Lunch Talk - Balanced Life

QY, my good old secondary school friend, was having her training at Park View Square and we met each other for lunch. It was a good lunch and to top it up, we had an excellent conversation about our personal views on having a well balanced life.

What is a well balanced life? I'm sure everyone of us has a common answer for it. It is the sort of life that we lead in order to bring joy and happiness into the various aspects of everyday living. Some of the main aspects being spiritual, social, intellectual and work.

Of course, everyone is unique and so places different emphasis on each single aspect of their life. There is no right and wrong weightage nor is there a standard amount of attention that one should place for each. As long as it brings about temporal and ultimate happiness, then one can consider that the current way that one leads their life is a good way. If it brings about suffering in our life, then we should reflect and try to reorganise our life style.

During our conversation, we reached a common understanding and i would like to draw your attention to this fact. The fact that we tend to neglect the social aspect of our life. It seems that most metropolitans living in a fast paced city tend to spend very little quality time with their family and friends. This is a well known fact and it is hardly healthy at all.

For simplification purposes, let's look at the average life of an working adult working from 9 to 6 during the weekdays and assuming we rests an average of 8 hours per day. On a normal working day, that is a total of 17 hours gone, leaving you with 7 hours. Take away 2 or 3 hours for travelling time to and fro, we probably have about 4 hours left. 4 hours left each day to do whatever is required to fulfill your social, intellectual and spiritual aspects of living. Seems hardly enough especially when we have to make up for the other 3 main aspects of our life.

We might argue that we have the whole of our weekend for the developing and fulfillment of all our other commitments. Giving us a total of 32 waking hours for the weekends and a total of 52 hours per week. That works out to be just slightly under half of our waking time (112 hours) per week. Is that enough? Some might say yes and some might say no. It's really up to the individual. But to me, if everything being equal, we are spending less than 50% of our time on 75% makeup of our life and more than 50% on 25% of our life's makeup.

Since we know that we might already be living an unbalanced lifestyle, do we really want to make it worse by getting our priorities wrong? Should we not pay more attention to some other things in our life that we may be neglecting all these while especially people like loved ones (parents, siblings, friends,etc...) ~ and i cannot stress more than enough ~ the study of our spiritual life so that we may lead our life with our surroundings in a more harmonious relationship (this is definitely lacking in a lot of us including myself).

I wish all of you well in finding the true path of your life and that you and your loved ones may always dwell in peace, joy and happiness! =)