B
Balance - Belief
This is a work in progress. I just hit “G” and I’m slowing down a little. My other project, a book on Pickleball, is at it’s final stages so I’ve been working on that a lot recently. I’m looking forward to picking this back up though and getting it going again.
Balance
“Balance is bullshit” has become one of my go-to phrases, mostly because of what we’ve done to that word.
Work-life balance gets sold like a finish line. If we could just get the ratio right, everything would settle down. Our anxiety would ease. Our relationships would feel better. Our bodies would stop screaming. We’d finally feel like we’re doing life correctly.
Except that’s not how life works.
If balance is a seesaw, most of us are out there trying to stand in the middle while crowds cheer us on. We make one tiny adjustment and one side dips. We correct and the other side drops. Micro-adjustment after micro-adjustment, always burning energy we don’t have, trying to keep the two seats from ever touching the ground.
For a moment it looks like we’ve got it.
Then the momentum shifts again.
And then our legs start to shake.
And then we fall.
And then we blame ourselves for falling.
That’s the scam. Balance gets framed as a moral achievement. If we’re not “balanced,” we must be doing something wrong. We must be undisciplined or bad at life or not trying hard enough.
Meanwhile, our actual lives refuse to stay in neat buckets. A rough morning leaks into the rest of the day. One exhausting conversation changes how available we are later. A bad night of sleep makes everything feel louder.
So maybe we stop asking, “How do I balance all this?” And instead get curious about how it all hangs together. No more perfect compartments or spreadsheet boxes. Just you, your life, your relationships, some honesty, and a lot of self-compassion.
Maybe then, we’ll jump off the seesaw and realize there’s a whole playground waiting for us.
See: harmony, energy, boundaries, burnout, values, rest.
Beauty
Beauty is a pull toward who we could become. It’s what happens when we glimpse our potential and life comes alive. It’s not always pleasant, but within beauty there is a promise that something more is possible.
That moment of contrast between what is and what could be can expand our world and break our hearts. Beauty knows both can be true.
It’s personal. What catches my breath might do nothing for you, and what moves you might leave me cold. It’s a clue that our longings, histories, and sensibilities aren’t identical. Beauty celebrates difference.
Some things are beautiful because they disturb us awake. They refuse to let us look away. They rearrange our insides and leave us with new connections. Truth, when it lands, can hurt and still compel us forward.
Beauty is a small, startling invitation to pay attention, because something matters here.
See: aesthetics, complexity, grief, hope, meaning, eudaimonia
Becoming
Being is real. It’s the quiet truth of existence. I am.
Becoming is the admission that we don’t stay the same, even when we wish we could.
Every conversation, every loss, every laugh, every ordinary Tuesday drops another ingredient into the mix.
It’s like cooking comfort food from a recipe. We start with a sense of what we’re aiming for, only now our tastes have changed, or the ingredients have. We adjust. And sometimes we end up making something new.
Sometimes becoming looks like adding extra salt.
Sometimes it looks like adjusting the cooking time.
Sometimes it means admitting the old recipe doesn’t fit our lives anymore.
Becoming isn’t productivity. It isn’t a self-improvement contest. It’s the practice of noticing what an experience did to us, choosing what we carry forward, and having enough humility to admit not all of it was ours to choose.
No straight lines. Just the recognition that life keeps shaping us.
See: being, identity, memory, experiment, discernment, embodiment.
Being
Being is real. It’s the quiet truth underneath our becoming.
It’s the “I am” or, in the language of this glossary, “I am enough.”
See: becoming, enough, rest, embodiment, identity.
Belief
Belief is a risk. Every belief is a chance we take when we assign meaning to an experience. While values pull our attention toward what matters, beliefs are the predictions we make about how to act on what matters.
That’s why a belief is never just “an idea.” It’s a posture. A reflex. A script we hand our nervous systems when life speeds up.
Our beliefs are built from stories, and stories shape how we experience the world. They’re not raw fact; they’re more like historical fiction: part event, part interpretation, and part imagination.
That doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with our beliefs. It just means they’re worth examining before we use them on ourselves or others.
If a belief makes us smaller, crueler, more rigid, or less human (toward ourselves or anyone else), then it’s probably worth questioning.
See: values, stories, doubt, data, meaning, faith.