How do you balance work and home life?
“How do I balance work and home life?” implies that work and home are each singular entities, like walking a tightrope- while balancing opposite ends of a scale. For me, life has never looked remotely that simple.
Over the years, I’ve come to think of balance less as walking a tightrope and more as trying to keep multiple plates spinning simultaneously. I prefer it this way! I’ve tried just one or two plates at a time! Some plates need constant attention. Others can wobble quietly for weeks before demanding intervention. Occasionally, one crashes while another unexpectedly steadies itself. I prefer the challenge. It gets me up in the morning!
My dreams have helped me understand this.
Using a Jungian approach to Dream analysis — not as fortune-telling, but as a dialogue with the unconscious — I began to notice recurring symbolic patterns. Jung believed dreams compensate for the conscious attitude and reveal tensions we either ignore or oversimplify. Again and again, my dreams presented overcrowded buildings, hidden rooms, airfields, rivers, institutions, journeys, lovers, families and unfinished spaces. Rarely was the central tension a simple binary. The unconscious seemed to be showing me not two competing forces, but a crowded psychic ecology in which many different claims on identity competed for time, energy and meaning.
Work itself divides into several worlds.
There is the creative sphere: advertising, media production, blogging, fiction, AI-assisted storytelling and the long-running excavation of diaries and memory. Creativity demands openness, risk, humour and imagination. It is psychologically fluid and often emotionally exposing.
Then there is sport. As a senior swimming coach working with age-group athletes, I inhabit an entirely different mindset: structure, discipline, physiology, timing, repetition, emotional leadership and responsibility for young people at formative moments in their lives.
Alongside this, there is environmental and civic work through my role as a Green Party councillor: trees, planning disputes, pollution, rivers, common land, local tensions, and questions of stewardship. That world often involves conflict, diplomacy, persistence and public accountability.
Each role requires not only time, but a different version of myself.
And then there is home.
My wife and I have been married for thirty-three years. With luck, we’ll make it to fifty or sixty years together. Across these decades, we have constantly adjusted roles around children, work, finances, domestic life and care. Sometimes one of us was more home-based. Sometimes the other carried more of the external burden. Family life is not a fixed arrangement but an evolving negotiation. House, garden, wider family, friendships and community all exert their own gravitational pull.
Balance is not something achieved once and then preserved forever like a gymnast freezing perfectly in position. It is dynamic. Rhythmic. Seasonal. Some weeks belong more to coaching, some months to writing. Certain periods require the family to dominate everything else. Occasionally, the unconscious itself intervenes through dreams, warning that one area of life has become too dominant while another has been neglected.
The older I become, the less I believe in perfect equilibrium. Life is movement. Adjustment. Compensation. Recalibration.
Perhaps the best image is not the tightrope walker after all, but the experienced juggler: alert, adaptive, slightly amused, aware that every object in the air matters, but also aware that no single object can be held forever without the others beginning to fall.
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