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Tuesday, April 23, 2013

April 23. Day 113. Finding your balance

By rights I should have the world's best cared for fingernails. I'd swear that my family confuse the concept of working from home with sitting on the couch, filing my nails and watching daytime TV. One glace at my fingers will reveal that to be one great big lie. The only filing going on relates to documents not nails. There's also no TV or acting like a couch potato.
Forget that. I'm in bed, drinking cups of tea and eating chocolate. That's what my family see. What they fail to concede is the laptop is fired up and the red pen is getting a serious workout on a pile of assignments at my side. I might not be in the office but that does not mean I'm not working. I am just not tied to the desk. I have flexibility for good and for bad. The good is that I can choose to go for a walk after school drop off instead of heading straight to work as I did this morning. The bad is that I may still be marking long into the night. It's a balancing act. Sometimes just staying upright and on top of it can seem incredibly difficult. And I'm not trying to master a skatecycle like Lewis Watson, a young man I met at the Roma Street Parklands this morning. He seems to have the balance thing sorted.
I admit that I find the concept of work/life balance somewhat intriguing. The mere term seems to suggest that something you do for eight hours a say isn't part of your life. On the flipside it also tends to suggest that none of what we do for the 16 hours we are not in paid employment is not work. What utter nonsense that is. Work is very much a part of life and very much part of what defines us. The trick is to not let it consume us which is not always as easy as it looks. Sometimes it is a struggle to just stay upright. At least I'm not trying to do it on a skatecycle.

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