Balance At Work During This Easter Season

Taking a quick break from our focus on the work of artists and craftsman, let's get an Easter refresher on achieving and being always balanced in our daily work. It's an element that applies to all of us, including artists and craftsman. Forget about the eccentric, unbalanced, crazy artist, if that's how you think of artists. You can be an artist without forsaking balance. We'll get to all that after we refresh things.

So today we'll take a look at how our continuing Easter Season can help us achieve real balance in our lives. First let's take a look at how this might apply to our work day.

Work has its ebbs and flows. At times, demands and deadlines press heavily on us. We get in early, stay late, work like a dog. At other times, things ease up a bit. Even the most well-organized can't always control those ebbs and flows completely.

If you work for someone else, you've probably lived through changes - sometimes sudden - in company priorities, changes in management. Just when you feel like you've got things under control, the rug is pulled out from under you and you're under the gun. If you've got your own business, you've got myriad factors like technology glitches and upgrades, market shifts, government regulations, changing tax laws, never mind customer needs or demands, etc., that you can't always control.

Accompanying that expanding and contracting "To Do" list, there's how we feel. Even when we're disciplined enough to get a good night's sleep, eat well, exercise, etc., some days we just wake up feeling not so great, even though we're not actually sick. You feel like you've got to literally drag yourself into work. Other days you wake up practically skipping, feeling like you're "king of the world."

Now you can either let yourself get jerked around by all this, or work on achieving balance regarding how you handle those ebbs and flows as well as those swings in how you feel. Personally, this has been a struggle for me. But over time, I think I've made some progress. Instead of reacting instantly, I've learned to take a deep breath, count to ten, remind myself that "all things shall pass" in this world of ours, and - ideally - by that time I can get on with my work day without all the sturm und drang that used to knock me this way and that.

A sense of balance helps not only at work, but in the rest of your life as well. That's especially true for our spiritual lives. And it's here that we can best see how the Easter Season can help us achieve real balance. Recall how we applied our Lenten discipline, with its focus on the suffering and death of Our Lord. In the Easter Season the Cross and Passion are balanced by the triumph of the Resurrection. Fr. Bertrand Weaver, C.P. has written about this. Here his wise words demonstrate the importance of this balance in our spiritual lives.

“There is always danger, when we consider intensively one mystery of the Faith, that we will not keep it in context with the other mysteries of the Christian religion. If any member of the Church were to concentrate his gaze on the Cross and Passion of our Lord, and hardly ever think of His triumphant rising from the dead, there would be a lack of balance in his very devotion to the Sacred Passion. We can be authentic members of the mystical body of Christ only if we ‘think with the Church.’ The mind and spirit of the Church is made clear in the liturgy. In the liturgy, the Church constantly associates the sufferings and death of Christ with His Resurrection. That some members of the Church do not keep the Passion and the Resurrection in context is evident from their attitude toward Lent and the Easter season. We cannot but rejoice that a multitude of Catholics enter wholeheartedly into the spirit of Lent, attending Mass daily, and performing acts of penance and charity. This is what the Church desires and urges us to do during Lent. She is, however, far from wanting us to make Good Friday the climax of this outpouring of devotion. The Easter liturgy, which begins with the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night, and which continues for the eight weeks following Easter, is the true climax of the Lenten liturgy. It should not escape our attention that Eastertide, the season of joy and fulfillment, is longer than Lent, the season of sorrow and penance."

If you applied yourself to your Lenten discipline, do so as well with an "Easter discipline." Next time, Fr. Weaver will help us understand better how to do just that.

For today, keep the joy of Our Lord's glorious Resurrection in your heart. Let it pour over into your work.

Happy Easter!