The Life I Don’t Need a Vacation From

My life is a beautiful one. Perfect?

No. But beautiful.

However, that hasn’t always been the case. For much of my adult existence, I’ve felt inadequate, off-balance and out of whack.

Then a few years ago, I discovered love. It was first the love of my higher power, then love for myself which opened me up to love for and from my life partner, family and friends. It is because of that love that life became beautiful and one I was able to stop trying to run away from.

There were two main reasons I was constantly on the run, one was my work and the other my romantic life.

I resolved the issue of my romantic life sooner than my work life, which is interesting because I had what I thought was very close to my dream job or at least most of the parts of my dream job long before the man came along.

This isn’t specifically about either of those, but rather the notion that life is supposed to look some particular way. That all the parts are supposed to magically fit some preconceived notion about life and then it’s supposed to be easy.

On the one hand I am a believer that we can and in fact should design our lives exactly as we want it. On the other, I recognize that no matter how much we design, there are just some variables out of our control and therefore, we need a backup plan.

Sorry to say this, that backup plan is flexibility. To simply pick up the shattered pieces and continue living. Living according to the original design. Living according to a modified design. But living nonetheless.

As I write this we are just a couple of weeks past the 14th anniversary of my only child’s death. Tragic. Life changing. Shattered pieces to be sure. It took some time and very intentional effort on my part to pick up the pieces and get back to living.

In the midst of that journey, I found myself in a toxic work environment that I felt was daily robbing my soul. Day after day, I looked for a solution to my problems that was outside of me. I soon discovered there was none. I had to take responsibility for where I was, but more importantly where I wanted to go.

As I carried on conversations in my head, and unfortunately for others with others, about how unhappy I was and how I hated my job, I realized I could continue feeling that way or begin to do something that would allow me to make changes and have to a life worth living.

The first thing I did was decided I wanted to be happy. Then I owned what made me happy. The big things, the little things. The Whitnie things. Stopped worrying about what other people thought of my choices and started enjoying being who I was.

As a result, I started to meet amazing people who shared joy for the same things and began to find balance in a life that after my son’s passing had gotten mired in work I didn’t enjoy and wallowing in my own self-created misery. Once I replaced those with love, laughter, passion and peace and frequently focused on the needs of other people, happy simply appeared.

It was a post I read recently about the myth of work-life balance that got me thinking about this. Balance is the goal of nature. It’s not a static state, but a dynamic one. Its foundation is not perfection, but to bring back something that has swung too far to one end of the pendulum.

I don’t begrudge people who want to eliminate the phrase work-life balance from the lexicon or even the concept as something to be pursued from doing so, but would caution that because the words are not used doesn’t mean that our natural need for reestablishing equilibrium doesn’t exist.