As a working mom, I have often heard of “finding balance.” It’s a popular saying among many performance and self-help circles. A few years ago, memory coach Jim Kwik introduced me to another perspective, “You will never find balance. Look instead for harmony.”

Previously, I never saw balance in a negative light, so it got me thinking about the difference between balance and harmony. As a mother, I find harmony to be much more forgiving. We are nature; we go through seasons. Life is a constant ebb and flow. It was easy to get work done when my kids were babies; I had very easy babies who started sleeping through the night at a young age and were never too fussy. I could wear them in my baby wrap, clean the house, or work at my computer. I found the toddler stage much more difficult; this is where balance was lost. My husband was busy building a business and I often lived like a single working mother. I also did not understand the concept of seasons, so I would feel like a loser for not being able to get it all done like I used to.

For those who have babies, who were fussier than mine, and definitely, for toddler moms, there is no such thing as 50/50 or rather 25 work, 25 mom, 25 wives, 25 self. That’s an impossibly specific standard. Young children need an enormous amount of time and energy from you, and what’s left of your energy gets split between yourself, work, and your significant other. This is where I found harmony to be more freeing for me. I can ask myself, of the energy I have left, what will be the thing that fills me up the most? Sometimes, it’s time for me to be able to read a book or take a hot bath. Other times, what is more filling is time connecting to my husband or friends. I want to note that there’s this perception often that moms should give 100% to their kids and have nothing left for their partners. If you give 100% to any one category in your life, you will burn out. Connection is vital for our well-being, mind, body, and soul.

I don’t want to go too in-depth into my life, and this isn’t necessarily a topic for moms. I wanted to give some insight into my thinking through my lived experiences. I spent some time a few months ago studying shame, and the concept of balance and harmony came up. What I learned was enlightening. I was interested in shame through the lense of hermetics. Everything has an equal opposite, but instead of thinking of it as a line think of it as a circle. For example, it can be so hot you get burned and something can be so cold you get burned. There also isn’t an exact temperature in which it goes cold from hot and that grey area is different for everyone.

Shame is considered the lowest-frequency emotion we can experience. It’s the emotion most associated with suicidal ideations. If you applied hermetic principles, the equal opposite would be authenticity or transcendence, depending on which scale you use. Shame is interesting because it acts as a container for society. If you think back to the beginning of mankind, if everyone did what they wanted, when they wanted, how they wanted, society would fall apart. I can see the utility of shame in that it creates a container for society to grow.

The grey area becomes the dance between your individuality and the whole of society. If someone experiences shame in the pursuit of being authentic to who they are, the opportunity (if you don’t crumble) is transcendence. I was curious: how does one transcend versus fall apart? I was using ChatGPT to help me work out these ideas, and harmony was the one word that continuously came up.

Here is a blend of my perspective and the information given by ChatGPT. Harmony is about complementary interactions, and instead of eliminating or neutralizing differences, it blends them so that each element enhances the other, much like an orchestra. Progression is the goal. Evolve and adapt. You are looking to the lesson in the hardship and applying what you learn. This may play out in your life in ways like having to apologize. Allowing yourself to feel emotions you previously wouldn’t and excavating why you were avoidant in the first place. Hello, vulnerability. You may have to play around with letting go of absolute control, especially when it comes to the way people view you.

Balance, on the other hand, is not about progression inherently. Balance is static; it’s about maintaining homeostasis. How do you achieve homeostasis? Through neutralizing differences, through keeping things the same. You may suppress or counter with equal measure. It’s about stability and preservation. In the context of shame, you aren’t working through shame to understand it and learn. You are using other emotions to take the feeling of shame away. If I feel shame, instead of working through how this feeling came to be, I’ll counterbalance it with something like ego. I won’t apologize; instead, I will double down on it being someone else’s fault. I may be more controlling, especially how I want to be perceived.

This is not an inditement of balance. It has its place. This highlights why balance is a much more forgiving strategy, especially over time. You learn, and you grow. You can become more resilient. In the context of being a mom, you aren’t supposed to get it all done. Trying to force this equilibrium in your life will come off as controlling and will exhaust you, and then you’ll end up having a mental breakdown. With harmony, it isn’t about always getting it right. Whether you seek balance or harmony, have fun with it. Treat it like an experiment and dance with it.