Mom in the Mirror

Striving for imbalance

Balancing is a circus act. It's walking on a tightrope or riding a unicycle or twirling plates at the end of a long stick resting on a short nose. Balancing is an act.

But I'm not a circus performer, just a mother, wife, daughter and friend trying to maintain my sanity, health and home. Balance looks like the problem and the solution. It is a mathematical unknown.

As Jennifer Louden writes in the October issue of body+soul magazine, "We think that by conforming to the ideal -- working 7.5 hours, exercising 20.3 minutes, spending 2.4 quality hours with children or elderly parents or community -- we'll achieve that perfect measure of peace."

Instead, we achieve the opposite -- stress -- because it is impossible to balance a scale that is too heavy. It tips over.

So, we must start removing what is weighing us down.

"Balance is, at its essence, about choice," Louden says. "It's the fluid, often heartbreaking process of choosing, moment by moment, where to spend your most precious resources: your energy and your time."

You can balance a meal and you can balance a checkbook, but you can't balance a life. We must be willing to live with imbalance.

We must have the courage to choose this over that, here over there, no over yes. We must have the clarity to do what matters most (spending time making and eating a healthy meal) and risk that the rest (that pile of thank you notes) will remain undone. We must have the calm to keep moving forward, rather than looking back.

"In order to achieve a balanced life, we must be a bit unbalanced -- by doing only what really matters," says Richard Koch.

It isn't about having it all (in just the right amounts), it's about choosing wisely.

I remember walking across the beam as a young girl during gym class. Back then, balance required carefully putting one foot in front of the other, without falling.

As an adult, I'm still trying to stay on the narrowing beam. The drop below looks more frightening than ever. What's down there? Failure. Falling means failing. It means being off-center, out-of-synch, lonely and disconnected.

The best gymnasts are exceptionally graceful on the beam, the rest of us look like we're trying too hard. Probably because many of us are.

What if we tried a little less hard? What if we threw our younger and older selves a rope so that we could hop down safely?

The best kind of balance allows us to carry ourselves proudly, without collapsing under the enormity of the burdens that press down, like a stack of Oxford English Dictionaries on our heads.

This kind of balance is about focus and priorities. It silences those competing inner voices that pile "should" upon "should" -- "I should exercise"; "I should call my in-laws"; "I should volunteer at my son's school."

When we remove the "should"s and tip the scales in favor of what is most essential, we gain a quiet certainty, the confidence that we're doing exactly what we want and need.

Even when all is not right with the world, all is alright.

And, on balance, that is enough.

A version of this LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.

Julie Powell on writing and blogging

The interview below originally appeared in Borders' "Original Voices" publication for October-November 2005. It struck me as a very interesting commentary on how blogs are changing writing and publishing. See what you think.

When Julie Powell turned 30, she was a secretarial temp living in Queens with her husband and cats, and her biological clock was ticking. From a search for purpose, the Julie/Julia project was born: She'd cook all 524 recipes in "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in one year, tracking her progress in a Web diary. Her blog entries formed the ingredients for Julie & Julia.

Borders: If you had merely kept a private diary of your experiment, instead of publishing a blog, how would that have affected your project?

Julie Powell: If I'd merely been keeping a diary, I'd have quit the second I hit a rough patch. I'm really not one for challenging myself. The blog gave me a built-in audience. It's like getting on stage: You can't really see what's beyond, but you know there's someone to perform for. Even if there's only one person, you're there for someone.

Also, since readers were following what I was doing, communicating with me, the writing took on a different form than it might have in a diary. Writing a blog is unlike writing a book, because you're doing it among people, whose feedback you get nearly instantly.

Borders: Are blogs shaping what gets read and what gets published?

Julie Powell: If I'd written a book proposal saying how I wanted to cook through a Julia Child book in a year, it'd have been a miracle if it hadn't been thrown into the paper shredder. Instad, I went online, and people found me. Perhaps no publisher could have guessed that there's a built-in audience for a 30-year-old secretary with a Julia Child fetish, but I got hits on my blog. It's a way for readers to express what they want to read instead of waiting passively for the right book to come along. At the same time, I hope I wrote a book that was more than the sum of my blog entries. Any blogger content to rest on her daily bread of one-liners will not be able to write a book that will, or should, find readers.

Your turn: If you kept a private diary instead of publishing a blog, how would that affect your writing? Are blogs shaping what gets read and what gets published?

The next Great American Journalist?

For nearly a dozen years, Pinellas County schools have hosted the Great American Teach-In, a day when parents and others spend time in the classroom talking with kids about careers that may interest them. Last week, Gary and I spent about 45 minutes with Colter's 4th-grade class, splitting the time between a discussion of journalism (me) and creative writing (Gary). We had a great time and then were pleasantly surprised by all the thank you notes we received from the students. This was my favorite:

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Moos,

Thank you for coming to our class for the Great American Teach-In. I found your presentation to be inspiring. I have decided to become a newspaper reporter from your inspiring ideas. I have recruited your son and my friend to help gather information. I will write editorials, sports and travel pieces.

What I enjoyed about your presentation was your passion for creativing writing. It was fun when Mr. Moos played a little game with us [Gary read them about a dozen different beginnings for "Little Red Riding Hood" that he wrote in different styles, from different characters' perspectives, then had them guess what story he was telling.] Thank you for giving us a notebook pad. It will surely help me in my reporting.

I appreciate you both taking time to come in our class.

P.S. Colter told me all the great stuff about you.

It turns out that right after we left, this boy interviewed Colter. He's aggressive and a schmoozer -- two strengths he can definitely put to good use as a journalist. Maybe someday he'll replace whoever replaces Peter Jennings. And we'll have a thank you note to remind us we helped him get started.

How smart do we need to be?

My 9-year-old son Colter loves to make me feel stupid. All he has to do is ask, "Mommy, what's a rhombus?" and I'm reminded of my limitations.

Like me, Colter enjoys his intelligence. But lately I've been wondering whether being smart is as advantageous as we think.

When I was my son's age -- and later a teenager -- I too believed the '60s slogan "Knowledge is power." I accumulated as much of both as I could. I was book smart and street smart, determined to make my way in the world armed with information.

But it turns out that determination, more than my grades or test scores, may have been responsible for where I've gone and what I've done.

In a New Yorker essay about Ivy League admissions, writer Malcolm Gladwell described the relationship between initial inclinations, "getting in," and subsequent success. He writes, "For most students, the general rule seems to be that if you are a hardworking and intelligent person you'll end up doing well regardless of where you went to school."

So why am I still paying off student loans? Because finding a community where I belonged felt priceless to me.

I recently returned to that community, my alma mater -- Barnard College, where the median math SAT score is 660, the verbal is 690 and graduates include eight Pulitzer Prize winners. I found myself surrounded once again by smart, strong, sarcastic women making all kinds of choices. They have gray hair and purple hair. They live in cities and in deserts. They are cardiologists and mothers.

By any measure, they are successful. But how did they become so?

According to Gladwell's reporting, native intelligence isn't enough.

"Being a smart child isn't a particularly good predictor of success in later life," he wrote. " 'Non-intellective' factors -- like motivation and social skills -- probably matter more."

We all know people who are very nice or politically savvy and manage to do very well for themselves, even though they may not be as capable as we'd expect.

Part of the problem may be our definitions. When we say someone is smart, we mean many different things. We may mean that she is articulate or skilled. We may mean he is clever or well-read. We may mean all of those and well-rounded, too.

The idea that success may hinge on balancing multiple ways of knowing allows for creativity, intuition, emotional literacy and more.

It explains people who compete phenomenally well at board games (like Trivial Pursuit) but not so well in the boardroom. We fault them for that because we value intelligence as a status symbol, more interested in what it gets us -- an impeccable degree, an important title, an impressive income -- than what it gives us.

Are we creating monsters with multiple titles?

At what point can I put down The New Yorker and and watch "Grey's Anatomy" without feeling guilty?

There's no question that intelligence can sometimes be a disadvantage. As a young woman, I was too intense, too intimidating and too ambitious for myself and my peers, I imagine. I hadn't grown into my brain or my potential.

While I believed that knowledge was power, I also felt that ignorance was bliss. It seemed the smarter I was, the unhappier I became.

And then there was all the stuff I didn't know -- I switched schools at least a half-dozen times between third and eighth grades, leaving me with educational gaps in art history, musical theory and biology. These days, my husband helps our son with science and social studies homework, while I pay close attention.

But if intelligence is the ability to think clearly and critically, wisdom is knowing how much we have to learn.

Life tests us, but it doesn't quiz us. You can't cram for work. Or study the Cliffs Notes to parenthood.

We make mistakes. We succeed and we fail. We live and we love and we learn. In the end, we hope to wake up smarter today than yesterday.

And that's all I need to know.

A version of this LifeFiles column originally appeared on about 70 TV station websites managed by Internet Broadcasting Systems.

If we can make it there...

In a few hours, I'll be on my way to New York City. I'm going to moderate a panel on blogging and writing (if anyone signs up!), and Colter and Gary are coming along for the weekend. Colter has never been to New York, and he's as excited as other kids get about going to Disney World. He can't wait to see the Nintendo World Store and Serendipity and Dylan's Candy Bar and the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty and the Sony Wonder Technology Lab and the Museum of Natural History and the list goes on. I'm exhausted already, but incredibly excited to experience the city through his eyes.

What's your favorite thing about NYC?

Too much information behind the wheel

Once upon a time, long ago, I received a ticket for speeding. And because I didn't want my insurance rates to increase, I agreed to enroll in a driving class. I had 60 days to complete the course, and so on day 59, I began it. The worst thing about this online experience was not that it would take four hours minimum. The worst thing is that it absolutely terrified me. I read each section carefully so I would pass the final exam, and as a result I learned about all the dangers lurking on the other side of that broken yellow line. After 15 pages of notes and a certificate from the "American Safety Council," I am now a much more anxious, self-conscious, and dangerous driver than I was before receiving a ticket. And we all lived happily ever after.