This journey started with a single word at the top of an e-mail I read at 3:08 a.m. one morning in March 2007.
“Congratulations!”
That single word started a deluge of thoughts about what the next 16 months of my life were going to be. A giant backpack, baggage claim conveyor belts, unfamiliar smells, traveler’s diarrhea, tropical heat, being alone. ... Mental images flashed like a montage but then my instinctual reaction was pure, joyous laughter. I danced around the living room with the dog.
I planned and dreamed, packed and re-packed. I felt so excited, and increasingly ready. I prepared documents, bank accounts, plane tickets, traveler’s checks etc. for weeks, and then I felt TOTALLY ready and calm. I left the U.S. from Logan Airport with 65 pounds moving from my back onto the baggage scale. My parents thought I was crazy for having such a big pack, but I knew I would drop it on the floor of my host family’s house upon arrival in Palau and then use a daypack until my next international flight. I was right.
I have since been living on Pacific islands for just over six months. Unlike my collegiate existence, the reasons that my heartbeat escalates these days are not exactly stress-related. Live music, exercise, romantic advances, and avoiding drunk men on the roadside come to mind as the repeated and recent causes. I know this means I just might sound like someone halfway around the world to all readers whose reality is fast-paced, and super-charged with electronics and personal transportation and communication capabilities. But that is what I should sound like. Here I am on a cloudless day with a half-filled purple notebook I found under my host-sister’s bed and a pen I picked up in the Tokyo airport, lying in the shade of an avocado tree, sipping pineapple juice. No joke. I have been thinking about work-life balance because of a recent conversation and a provocative article I came across in a New Zealand magazine. For those of us recently out of college, work-life balance takes on new meaning and brings some very real challenges. Now, I am in a unique position where my work-life balance is ideal for me because I am blessed to be able to set my own research agenda and schedule. Therefore, work-life dilemmas exist more in my thoughts of the future than in my current reality.
But that doesn’t mean that work-life balance is not a relevant topic or something that frequently comes up in my travels. It is inescapable. I’ve been engaging in work-life conflicts through interactions and conversations with people in remote villages or developing coastal cities from Palau to New Zealand. Out here, work-life balance is just as often about reputation and social stability as it is about balancing income with leisure time. In Palau, a large proportion of one’s income is spent financing other family members’ birthday parties, childbirth ceremonies, and funerals as well as hours and hours on what can seem like every weekend. Escaping these cultural obligations is one of the main reasons many Palauans move to the U.S. I see that as a choice to directly affect their work-life balance, meanwhile creating a bit of guilt for causing other family members who stay in Palau to bear the brunt of these longstanding expectations.
Sometimes work-life balance is just not your choice. With the deep and longstanding influence of the Christian church in the rural Pacific, the sin of unmarried pregnancy causes social out-casting and perpetuates poverty. If you get pregnant, you had better get married and quick—no time to worry about your current or future job. I consoled an eighteen year-old Tuvaluan who experienced an unsuccessful traditional abortion. She was ashamed, frightened, and barely eating a thing. She had to face telling her parents she was pregnant and then possibly not being allowed to go to university on a scholarship. This of course would change all future work and life prospects in a country where only a handful get scholarships or university degrees. In many cases, that’s the difference between being able to build a house and afford a car, or living in a self-made tin structure that could be blown over with a mild tropical storm. Within two weeks of telling her parents, this lovely young woman had a ring on her finger and was moved into her new husband’s house just hours after the ceremony. I went over to say hello, and she was sitting cross-legged against the wall, looking at the floor out of embarrassment and shyness. She had barely ever spoken to her in-laws, and was expected to prepare a feast for them on her first day living in their house. Now, a month after the wedding, she is still awaiting word of a scholarship. Her father, however, will have the final say about her future no matter what she, her mother, or her grandparents think. The work-life dilemmas I’ve witnessed in the middle of the Pacific are sometimes the same—and sometimes shockingly different because of unique cultural contexts.
I must admit that during most of the time since graduation, I have pushed away thoughts of how to negotiate the work-life terrain. Because I can. Such worries are for when I’m ready to find a “real job.” But what is a “real job” anyway? I spent the last few weeks with Fijians who tried to convince me that Western notions of a “real job” might be the problem. One man in particular, Sel, is in his mid-30’s. He has spent his post-grad life trying out close to a dozen jobs in New Zealand before settling in Fiji, where his family is. He has a round face, shaved head, and grows a mean mustache when he feels like it. When I asked Sel what he does for a living, he told me he’s a toaster repairman. A few days later, when his work-life management came up again in conversation, I did not know what to say. Did he really repair toasters or was I just awfully bad at figuring out his sense of humor? I think he sensed my apprehension, and explained, “The way someone reacts to my claim that I repair toasters shows me enough about their personality to know whether or not I want to spend more time with them.”
I must have passed the test because Sel and I continued to spend time together. Slowly but surely, he would answer business calls on his mobile, run into employees in town, or simply mention things that made it quite clear to me that he did not repair toasters and in fact, he is in charge of many other people in what is probably his own company. But I respected that he did not want to admit that, or to clarify what he actually does. He declared it tiresome and unnecessary that social hierarchies are created, often subconsciously, based on one’s job. He chooses to avoid being concerned with status. The following week I met a handful of Sel’s closest friends, and did not bother to ask them “what they do.” None of them ever asked me, either. We enjoyed hanging out, BBQ-ing together, and talking about what they like to do. I think the point Sel is making is a valuable one: after all, one of the reasons so many of us feel anxiety about work is because of how others will judge us based on “what we do.” In Western cultures, this is a big part of your identity. You can’t separate work and life as the work-life dichotomy may appear on paper.
How you spend your time makes up your life. Hopefully there is not more work you dislike than every(any?)thing else. As a business owner, Sel sets his own hours and vacations. In some ways, this system is ideal, although it can also make it more difficult to separate work and play if it causes you to always seek out new clients and find networking an unavoidable goal at social gatherings. And what if you’re a freelancer? Can one ever fully relax without a consistent paycheck, especially if it is necessary to create an income anew every month?
More free time, less stress, slower pace. ... sounds ideal to most, I’m sure. But all of these things inevitably mean less money on the other side of the equation. Money is useful; money leads to choices and opportunities. But it also creates a whole lot of stress that I don’t sense in communities without much money and more emphasis on basic needs and happiness. Last night, a young man I was having a conversation with condensed this dilemma about income and quality of life into the same key question for the third time in my life. That question to brood over is, “How much is enough?”
How much is enough?
The first time I was advised to use that question as a guiding force in my life was by Phra Paisan, a Buddhist monk who lives in a forest temple in Northern Thailand. His wise eyes and calm demeanor revealed years of disciplined thought and a simple lifestyle. We sat talking on a mahogany floor underneath a large white statue of Lord Buddha. The question he presented stuck with me in such a profound way I felt deeply guilty when I arrived home to the States: I had more stuff in my own bedroom at that moment than he had ever owned in his life.
In Fiji this past fall, a young woman named Kise and I were talking about life in her village (population 200). The local trend in home building had quickly moved away from abundant local plant materials in favor of imported cement and corrugated iron. “It is faster and easier to put up a cement house,” she explained. But the “modern” houses are also not able to withstand strong winds and hurricanes as well as iron and they absorb more of the tropical sun’s heat. She continued, “The problem is, once you can afford to pay for building materials, you want to pay for running water and a flush toilet and other things because they are status symbols.” Her kids were running around playing touch rugby in the grass, building up their appetites. She continued, “My kids don’t want to eat local food any more, they want crackers and butter and jam. Those things cost money. ... Everything starts to change. How much is enough?”
Then last night, I went to see a fantastic band in Auckland, New Zealand. This was my first time paying to see live music in six months, and handing over my credit card for $75 was a bit of a shock. But it was totally worth the experience and the interaction I had with the Korean student in the seat next to me. After the show, an ex-pat American radiologist in his early 30s, tan from afternoons out on his surfboard after work, brought up the topic of work-life balance as we sat over our pints of local summer ale. Scott shared his epiphany moments, a few parables, and the rational principles that guided him as he discovered a work-life balance that suits his goals. He found it much easier to sort these things out in New Zealand, where he says there “may be a rat race, but it’s not an eight-lane express highway toward a certain ideal of success.” He has spent years creating a work-life philosophy based on a few key questions. He suggests asking yourself, “Are you living someone else’s dream, or your dream? If you wake up and realize you’re not doing what you want to be doing, its time to make some changes.”
He makes it sound so easy.
I reply, “Making work-life balance choices is not that simple!”
He continued, “Well I think it all comes down to one question, how much is enough?”
There it was again.
Walking an almost-deserted street at 11 on a Monday night, Scott and I talked about how both of us would rather spend money on experiences than stuff. That is one answer to the question I have discovered for myself. Right now I have almost total freedom, but no income to speak of. “How much is enough” is an easy question for me to answer materially because things either fit into my research budget or they don’t. It’s as if I won CHOICE at the lottery instead of cash. I wake up and think, What do I want to do today? What do I want to get out of today? Do I want to engage with the people around me? Do I want to listen and learn, try new things, explore, and take photos and cold showers to rinse off the tropical sunshine-induced sweat? Heck yeah. This might be the only time in my life I can just be myself and have that be enough. Each village, town or city offers different things so I am continually adapting and re-prioritizing in ways I have never had to before. It is all about life balance. I have no one else to be responsible for, no loans to pay off, no parental or familial cultural obligations ... and since I don’t yet know which way I want to go next year, I am not trying to boost my resume for a particular job or career path. I feel open. Open to the possibility of simply letting things unfold as they have in the past. Being immersed in other cultures makes it that much more obvious that the fact I have the ability and the privilege to contemplate and make choices about my own work-life balance is none other than a blessing.
So I leave you with some questions to ask yourself, wherever you are:
What are your choices? What’s in your control? What is important to you?
And of course, how much is enough?