Rootless: Life-Work Balance Out of Whack

In his book, The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge used the analogy of a kitchen faucet to make a point about the lag time between making a change and seeing the desired results. Well, it was about more than that, but I'm going to borrow it for my own purpose.

Say you want some warm water. You turn on the hot and cold water handles, but the water remains cold. So you open up the hot water handle some more, and the water's still too cold, so you close up the cold water a little bit, and then all of a sudden the water's too hot, so you have to adjust the hot and cold handles again til you get the temp where you want it. There's always a lag time between an action and a reaction.

I wanted more EFL students so I could increase my income ... and little by little I got more. Yay!

Then came this one night when I realized that even though I'd completed my last class a few hours earlier, I was still doing related administrative work. About the same time, I was wondering, damn, what's happening to my creative life? 

You see what happened is this: I suddenly found myself with too much of a good thing! (I love teaching English online.) There wasn't much administrative work with my online teaching job, but what there was hadn't grown incrementally, it had grown exponentially, with the result that my work-personal life was completely out of whack.

But fortunately, the Universe looked kindly upon me. Because almost to the day that I realized my predicament, a hand reached out to me with an enticing invitation to consider a professional zag from my current zig. I accepted that invitation and one week from tomorrow, I will be working full time and yet have more personal time for creative, tourist-in-residence pursuits than I do now.

I'll still be in the EFL world, but not as an EFL teacher. I am wistful about not teaching, but enthusiastic about my new role. 

For now, I'm looking forward to a resumption of balance.