Towards A Balanced Life (Living Your Life With Dr. Abdulfattah Adeyemi)
To be balanced is akin to dealing justly between people, being fair in business, listening to all sides before making a conclusion, acting in an unbiased manner, taking an appropriate action having considered the prevailing circumstances and the realities of a situation. To be balanced is to maintain a middle, but mostly, a fair course of action, thought and general being. However, middle is not a position – it is a constant flux between extremes.
Life is very much a balancing act between opposites: flowing and stagnant, dynamic and dormant, flexible and tough, smooth and rough, freeze and thaw, cooked and raw. You are between being shy and aggressive, being lazy and hardworking, being friendly and businesslike, maintaining solitude or being immersed in a buzzing social circle. You are in-between building yourself intellectually and giving your brain some time to rest, expressing yourself freely and editing your words or keeping quiet. You are to juggle between selflessly giving love and rightly demanding to be loved back, being concerned about others and minding your own business.
Are you physically exhausted, mentally stagnant or emotionally malignant? Are you financially drained? Do you find yourself falling out with good friends or feeling lonelier by the day? Do you feel a lack of spiritual alignment? If you answer ‘Yes’ to any of these questions, your life is probably out of balance. Therefore, you need to put the various elements of your life in perspective – marriage and family, money, health, social circles, spiritual growth, and intellectual development. You need to reassess your position, and then deal with any aspect that is taking too much time and energy at the expense of the others. But while you stay focused, don’t stay frozen. Your decisions are not to be made in concrete and steel, rather you should endeavour to adapt, manage, and balance.
We should also note that at every point in time, different people are faced with different “middle points” of balance in their lives. This is why we cannot all adopt the same template for our individual balancing acts strategies. Your neighbour’s priority might be to get a new car, while your focus is on your children’s education. Your friend may need to exercise more regularly to keep fit, while you need to develop your spiritual side of life. A colleague may need to spend more time with his family, while you need to read more books.
We should be relentlessly juggling and constantly trying to distribute our energies among the various aspects of our lives in reasonable proportions, setting our priorities right, while focusing on our goals. Remember, a mango tree would be off-balance if the branches are bigger than the trunk.
