I grew up before the idea of balanced living was invented, at least in our family. I don’t remember my parents speaking about needing more balance in their lives. It probably seemed an impossible goal. Their days were packed with endless child raising, working and caring for extended family members. My mother, a nurse, sometimes came home after an eight-hour shift at a nursing home only to sleep on the couch in her white uniform and then go back on duty for another shift. She might make something in a free moment. Perhaps she’d model a small replica of a desert island with plaster of Paris, or cut out a dress pattern on the dining room table. Meals were composed of the New England trinity: meat or fish, potato and vegetable; mashed potato, codfish and cauliflower. The need to balance the composition with green beans or red beets was irrelevant. I might have tried, after worshipping at the altar of Betty Crocker’s Cookbook, but it’s a faint memory except for the pages of bright, colorful meals. My father, a builder and a fixer of all things, could be called out at midnight to unthaw a frozen water pipe in winter in the mobile home park he managed, or spend days rebuilding the engine of a car or a lawn mower. On a quiet evening, he sat in a rocking chair by the bookcase reading the Encyclopedia Britannica. Once he built a grandfather clock in the middle of the living room on a long table. Sawdust lingered for months on every cobweb. Life was a circle of work, preparing bland meals, raising children, and the occasional craft project. If balance is related to the relationship between work and […]