This is a brief presentation that I did with the Wabash (2013) pre-tenure group.

2. Balance is Leiros
Living Abundantly amidst Our Many Vocations

4. What we Hope for …
Understand the problematics of balance in pursuit of a theological vocation
that claims life is abundant.
Recognize our own implicit and explicit assumptions, values, and
expectations for living an abundant life? Ask, “what kinds of choices are we
already making to support or contradict our assumptions, values, and
expectations? How do we practice full human agency and make our values
about life explicit to our colleagues, students, and deans/administrators (and
ourselves)?”
Recognize that abundant life invites celebration amidst the multiplicity of
vocations, amidst the vulnerability, and even amidst the suffering.
Enter a reflective time to understand one’s own failures and frustrations in
balance (lay them down) and begin to enter an understanding and
engagement of life toward its abundance.

5. Oh mind you carry on your back
Your actions like a heavy sack.
No wonder that your shoulders ache
Another strain's enough to break
Your neck
So drop this stupid load.
This is the last stop on the road
where you can find rest
Stay, be Loves guest.
~Kabir

6. Balance
equally distributing separate entities
against each other as to allow all to
remain upright and steady.
Balance assumes conflict
#against
assumes isolated entities (work-
life)
assumes YOU are the primary
and only agent (loneliness)
assumes we have the control to
keep all things upright and
steady.

7. Balance
David Whyte
The Three Marriages:
Reimagining Work, Self, and
Relationship
“People find it hard to balance work with
family, family with self, because it might
not be a question of balance. Some other
dynamic is at play… something that does
not quantify different parts of life and
then set them against one another. We
are collectively exhausted because of
our inability to hold competing parts of
ourselves together….”

8. Balance
Balancing Life
Partner/Others
Academic Institution/Work
Self

9. Balance
Balancing Tenure
Teaching
Publishing
Service to the
Institution/Faith
Community

10. Balance
“We should stop thinking in
terms of work-life balance.
Work-life balance is a concept
that has us simply lashing
ourselves on the back and
working too hard in each of our
commitments. In the ensuing
exhaustion we ultimately give up
on one or more of them to gain
an easier life.”

11. –David Whyte
“The antidote to exhaustion is not rest but
wholeheartedness.”

12. invitation to wholeheartedness in
vocation
a marriage of marriages
Could you still live your life, pursue
your loves, in the midst of life’s
onslaught?

13. marriage of marriages
assumes mutual and multiple
agents - ask for help and be
one for whom others ask
assumes making the implicit
explicit - a conversation
assumes entry through “a
doorway of vulnerability”
assumes desire for abundant
life which is peace, joy,
happiness, and reconciliation

14. abundance
a marriage of marriages
“Marriage is where all of these difficult
revelations can consign us to
imprisonment or help us become
larger, more generous, more amusing,
more animated participants in the
human drama.”

15. letting go/being present
“It is a difficult discipline in all three marriages to let a
person go, continually, to see if that person comes
back, to let a work go so that it can be reimagined or
to let a fixed idea about ourselves evaporate and be
replaced by something more flexible.”