Balance is Impossible

By guest author Renée Cramer

Play with me for a moment, please:

Imagine that you’re standing on a bosu ball, on one leg, while juggling flaming batons.

Imagine that you are an elephant expected to sit precariously on the tiniest of stools, while mice run back and forth in front of you.

Imagine that you are walking a tightrope strung across Niagara Falls, in high heels.

In all of these imaginings you’re “doing it” – you’re balancing!  You’re juggling!  You’re keeping up! Congratulations!  

And when it’s over – when you collapse on the floor or the couch, or the stool breaks, or the net below you cradles you gently as you fall towards the water – you’re exhausted.  You’ve done it – balanced everything – but at what cost?

Life in higher education, which is the workplace I know best, often feels like this; we endure cycles of boom and bust, marathon-length sprint-paced work sessions followed by burn-out and exhaustion.  What is the semester, really, beyond a thirteen- to fifteen-week sprint?  And the period leading up to tenure and promotion might be the longest seven years of precarity we may be lucky enough to experience.  Let’s not forget the processes of publication – intense bursts of work with ephemeral payoffs that most in our family might not understand or recognize.  And the cultural message we receive the entire time is that everything will be OK, if we can only just “find work/life balance.”  If we are women, in particular, the imperative to balance it all is clear.

I say no. 

In fact, I say balance is undesirable – indeed, impossible – and, further (controversial opinion here) I argue that academics in particular are poor balancers.  We are, after all, people who have made careers out of diving headlong into the study of one particular area of our particular discipline.  We spend our time working hard – catching up – and then … berating ourselves for not being more “balanced” in our approach.

We are often hyper-focused – but the cure for the exhaustion we feel when we are at our limit is not, may not be, as we have been told to might think, rest.  Rather: the key for the ‘why bother’ doldroms that come with flat-out exertion is often whole-hearted living. 

When I think about the impossibility of balance, I think about four sources in particular – as well as my own lived experience as someone who refuses to balance: Sarah Cote Hampson’s fabulous scholarship on paid family leave (and the fact that academic women often don’t take it), Jennifer Louden’s coaching and community discussions of “why bother?,” Emily and Amelia Nagoski’s terrific book Burnout, and my yoga practice.

Hampson’s work clearly shows that to be an “ideal worker,” is to be incompatible with being an “ideal mother,” and that when women try to be both, we feel like failures in both realms.  I think it is safe to extend this to gender neutral language – it is exceptionally difficult to be an ideal caregiver, while also being an ideal employee/worker. 

Clearly, when I am teaching a class, I can’t be thinking about calling the school office for my sick kid; when I am cooking a healthy snack, I have a hard time doing line edits on a page proof.   But “balance” isn’t multi-tasking – and that is why it is such a pernicious concept.  We all know we can’t multitask the dentist with the grading – yet we are given the cultural ideal that we will spend equal time, effort, and energy on these tasks – we will have a perfect pie chart of a life that includes a “balance” of time and effort spent working, caring, resting, and recreating.  I have obsessively tracked my time spent on various types of tasks, always hoping I’d get the perfect pie, and ending up with something more similar to a multi-pointed star, or an octopus.

In the face of this inability to “balance,” many of us will say, “Why bother?” 

At my lowest and most overwhelmed moments this sounds something like the voice in my head saying, “Why bother drinking a glass of water, I don’t have time to run to the bathroom during office hours?”  or “Why bother getting up five minutes early to meditate, I’m going to be stressed by the end of my 9am meeting anyway?”  Even when not completely overwhelmed, I have heard myself thinking, “Why bother planning that nice family meal, I’m going to have to rush out for an admissions event after?” and “Why bother finishing that R&R, they only fund 6% of grant proposals anyway?” In short, I find myself asking a version of: “Why bother extending the effort – I’m already at the end of my rope?”

This is burn-out, plain and simple –and burn-out is caused by external factors that work against us WHILE we hold onto the ideal of perfect balance.  Burn-out is caused by the thinness of the tightrope, the height of the heels, the wind blowing us sideways, and the expectation we hold that we should smile while walking gingerly above the Falls.  Emily and Amelia Nagoski tell us that completing the stress cycle is the most important thing we can do to alleviate burnout.  But, crucially, they also note that cultures and institutions need to respond to the burn-out that is disproportionately caused by gendered and racialized inequality. 

This is where institutional responses to the crisis around balance are super important, and where a focus on balance fails us.  As long as we believe that we should be balancing and juggling our demands while perched on the bosu ball – we never question why the bosu ball is so damned unstable.  When the three-legged stool of tenure breaks beneath us, we ask why we were so heavy, rather than why the legs weren’t of equal size or girth to support us.  We decide we should take some weight off, rather than lean in to the experience.  Or, we go the other direction, as Jen Louden writes, and “confuse grit with grind.”  Surely, Louden suggests that we do need to rest – really rest – on the way to recovery.  But she also tells us that community, engaged living, and allowing ourselves to truly want and desire something, are ways back from ‘why bother’ and burn-out, too.

I was part of a National Science Foundation funded workshop on “failure” in the academy a few years ago.  More than a dozen political scientists at all stages of our careers gathered in Washington, DC for a weekend of intense and vulnerable conversations about those moments where we most certainly were not balancing everything – the times people became single parents, lost partners, were not granted tenure, worked to exhaustion, and the like.  Several outstanding reflections came out of our time together, and I was happy to co-author a piece on the fallacy of balance, with two amazing colleagues.  In that piece, we identify specific practices that institutions can undertake, to reduce a focus on balance, and enhance a sense of faculty as whole people.  Among the suggestions we make are: workplace socials that are kid friendly, not scheduling meetings during school pick-up or drop-off times, setting standing meetings far enough in advance to facilitate childcare and eldercare options, and having institutional commitments to recognizing and rewarding unseen and unpaid labor (often shouldered most by women, and faculty of color). 

When academic institutions respond to faculty-employee needs in this way, I liken it to accepting the help of a prop in my yoga practice.  If you’ve ever practiced, you know that having a wall to place your fingers on makes the standing poses possible; having blocks beneath your hands makes triangle accessible; having a strap enables clasped hands in cow-facing pose.  And here’s the thing: my yoga teachers – any good yoga teacher – will tell you that it is always better to have integrity in the pose, than it is to hold something awkwardly, painfully, or in a way that doesn’t facilitate your breathing. 

A yoga teacher once said to me, after watching me hold my breath and contort uncomfortably into one-legged bridge pose, “balance might be impossible here, integrity is not.”  In other words, she gave me permission to use my hands to lift my hips, or lower them a bit to find equilibrium, or shrug my shoulders together more to raise my heart, using the floor as an assistant.  This isn’t cheating.  This is simply acknowledging that to benefit from the pose, I will use the supports provided me, to hold it in integrity.

Institutional policies that support our whole lives are far and above more important than institutional policies meant to help us “balance” a set of unreasonable demands. Institutional supports are the props we use in yoga, to maintain the right level of comfort and challenge in our practices.

So, let’s play again:

This time, imagine that you are holding office hours, virtually, during a global pandemic when a monumentally-important murder verdict is reached; at the same time that your dog barfs on the floor and your partner gets a bad reaction from the 2^nd Covid vaccine.  And, you get to teach your undergraduate seminar in 10 minutes.

There is no balance here – there is only life. 

I hope you work at an institution that has instituted integral supports for your life and your work: the possibility of stopping the tenure clock, without negating the pay raise you would have received if successful in the seventh year; reassigned time for the emotional labor of intense student mentoring during a pandemic and racial justice crises; clinics on campus to receive the vaccine; the understanding that you might miss a meeting to take your dog to the vet; meditation spaces for quiet reflection on the verdict, open to faculty, staff, and students.  If you don’t work at an institution like that, I would offer this: your time might be better spent, helping your institution have integrity, than balancing on one leg, on a bosu ball, while juggling flaming batons.

Renée Ann Cramer is currently Professor and Chair of Law, Politics and Society at Drake University, as well as Herb and Karen Baum Chair of Ethics in the Professions.  Starting officially on July 1, she will be Drake’s Deputy Provost for Academic Affairs where her portfolio includes faculty success and development, and strategic initiatives – prime places for helping to grow integral institutional cultures.  Her most recent book is on the mobilization of midwives; she is working on one that develops the themes you see in this blog.