Last week, I promised to blog a bit more about balance. In the meantime, I restored some balance to my life by taking a few days off to relax and refresh.

As I noted in my previous post, one reason that it's hard to keep balance in our lives is because we're trying to balance too much. At some point, you reach your limit and can't go farther. That's not failure. That's being human.

In many ways, I think modern life makes it even more difficult to maintain balance for three primary reasons:

1) Communications technology makes us more accessible. Even when I'm on vacation on the other side of the world, I can get emails from work. In some cases, a response is expected — even needed — immediately. In other cases, just the presence of a full inbox creates stress and makes me start answering. (For example, since I sat down to have lunch half an hour ago, I've received 5 emails — and opened them. Yes, I'm at lunch.) It was different when the only way to reach people was via a telephone message that they could receive only when they got back to a hotel room at the end of the day and that might not be able to be returned easily due to time differences and the lack of answering machines. It was even more challenging when you had to wait for the letter to arrive!

2) Our world of concern has expanded. For centuries, most people were only vaguely aware (if that) of what happened in places beyond their local community and maybe the neighboring city. News would be carried by travelers, minstrels, and pilgrims and might be months or years out of date. So, most people focused their energies on those closest to them — family and neighbors. Of course, most people had to work very, very hard just to stay alive. Today, however, we are bombarded by things that happen across the planet, raising constant feelings that we should do something to help, to make a difference. Needs haven't necessarily expanded, but we are aware of more of them.

3) The activities available to our choice have expanded. Given mobility and technology and the resources available, we have so many things we can choose to do. On an average summer evening, I could go for a run or walk, visit a friend, make some phone calls, go shopping, do household chore, go to a movie, watch tv, read a book, do a craft, volunteer somewhere, write a letter, play with my dog, have a nap….. The options are nearly endless. It's a wonderful gift to have so many choices, but it's also a burden.

In the next post, I'll talk about some ways to address this feeling of imbalance.