the case for living life in seasons

just give yourself to something

Most of us live with the belief that balance is something we should always strive for; not too much on one side or the other, aiming to create an everyday life where we sit comfortably in the middle. Too much of anything and we let a couple of weeks pass before we tell ourselves it’s time to get it together, get my life back on track.

You probably know what I’m referring to. You’re spending a lot of time with your best friends during a less busy work period, so you’re not going to the gym as much. You’re working on a new project you feel so inspired and excited by, so you don’t engage in some of your other hobbies for a while. You’re having the best time traveling around Italy, so you’re eating pasta and pizza every day. And so on. It naturally happens; when your focus leans too heavily on one thing, it fades in other areas, we can’t do it all. Conversations around balance are different today than they were years ago, because they’re increasingly influenced by the general social-media-led discourse on wellness.

Social media can be great in terms of inspiring you to get your life together and get back on track. Wellness and lifestyle influencers will show you how they balance running three business ventures, meal prepping, planning their wedding, reading 1 book a week, hosting dinner parties for their friends once a week and creating daily content. Sometimes they make it seem doable enough for you to get a kick of inspiration to attempt the same. My experience with that is that passively consuming this type of content for years and having those beliefs form subconsciously in the back of your mind, discreetly turns into a type of stress unique to our generation (lucky us!) and the time we’re growing up in. In The Perfectionist's Guide to Losing Control, Katherine Morgan Schafler explores the type of stress that harbouring these beliefs around balance can cause, especially in anyone who is in some way a perfectionist- and there are many vastly different types of perfectionism. She shares what it often looks like in practice: successful people who are doing everything right, living seemingly perfect lives and balancing it all. But for some reason, they’re unable to sleep at night, a kind of stress creeping in. “I’m not stressed though, everything is great” — and on paper, it is. Everything is going great, but this stress is created and fueled by the fact that they’re not living the lives they want to be living on most of those perfectly balanced days.

The conversation around balance and wellness creates a very fine line between inspiration and pressure. This fine line is something most of us are not aware of. We hesitate to give too much of ourselves to something when we feel like it, in fear that it will derail other areas of our lives if we do. The problem is that I think we end up fueling this pressure a little bit too much, instead of allowing ourselves to give in once in a while and follow the things that make us feel most alive at any given point. At the end of your life, I think you’ll look back at all the times where you gave yourself so wholly to something, as some of the most enriching experiences.

Living a constantly balanced life aims to keep all areas of our life at a steady happy medium - but there’s so much beauty and life in letting ourselves get lost in one area or the other from time to time. Living life in seasons recognizes and embraces that. Some seasons are for going all-in on a passion project; some seasons are for traveling and having no good routine for a while; some seasons are for falling in love; some for obsessing over a new hobby. And some seasons are for ‘getting it together’ and feeling very balanced. The first weeks of months of falling in love, you might want to think about nothing else; sometimes something’s all-consuming, it’s a beautiful experience to be in.

The very first essay I published on this blog was about the nature of inspiration and why it’s so important to me. I’m again brought back to that topic because I realize that all conversations around inspiration, all my thoughts on living life in seasons, relate to the simple joy and contentment of being able to follow your feelings in your day to day life without the pressure to be doing something else. To give in to inspiration or momentum or a feeling of aliveness is all the same: it means having the freedom to pursue what your heart most wants to pursue at a given moment. To put balance above that every single time, and confine yourself to following a blueprint of what your life should look like, denies you some of life’s greatest pleasures. For what? I’m not sure.

I also keep seeing a lot about how finding things you are genuinely obsessed with can lead to more fulfilment, success, joy, excitement. Finding something you’re obsessed with and allowing yourself to exist in that obsession and embrace it, is what leads to some of our most creative and fruitful periods. Not always easy to do because balance is often simply necessary, but there’s a case to be made for letting ourselves simply fall into something, and how good that can be. I’m guilty of trying to fit everything I want to do into every week, consistently. Sometimes I just need to take a month where I do more of this, less of that. Maybe I’ll read zero books in January because I’m falling into a new hobby I want to do every second day - that’s fine (that’s good!). Striving for the perfect balance hasn’t always served me well.

If you’re naturally a very disciplined person this will probably apply to you more than to someone that’s always struggled with discipline. That’s why perfectionists who tend to be great at keeping themselves disciplined might find this stress creeping in without realizing it until years and years have passed. My perspective is that of someone that has always been very disciplined, but is also very conscious of not being so to a fault. I don’t want to deny myself the value of bigger and better and more beautiful experiences for the sake of discipline. It’s great to have some seasons that are more imbalanced than others - giving yourself a life well lived means allowing yourself to indulge in whatever your heart desires from time to time.

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This is a slight rewrite and repost from an old post of mine from back when my Substack had just a handful of subscribers. I was thinking about this again these days and wanted to share it with some new thoughts for my new subscribers here <3

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