Dr. Perri Klass, pediatrician, writes about a classic tension that thinking, working, loving human beings experience:

Here is the thing about family-and-career: it is not a problem, or an issue especially for women, or a knotty dilemma amenable to clever tips. It's just what my life is: my family and my job and some little, harder-to-classify pieces of myself, floating around the edges. I won't come to any cosmic understanding of how to do it right. I'm simply going to live it day by day and year by year, with some good moments and some bad moments. The decisions, large and small, that I make along the way won't add up to a strategy; they'll add up to who I am. And even though women rarely ask men to expound on family-and-career — maybe because we understand that for a man, this is just another name for a full, busy, everyday life — it's as true for men as it is for women that these decisions will add up to who they are.

Surely we're all past the "either-or"; that approach has been dead and gone for decades. You make your own particular mixture. I could spend all my time and energy on my children, but then I wouldn't have my job, and my life would have less meaning. Or I could spend all my time and energy on my job, but then I wouldn't have my family, and my life would have less meaning.

Making tough choices, achieving balance among competing goals — that's what growing up is all about.

(from "So Where's My Medal?" by Perri Klass, M.D., in the New England Journal of Medicine, v. 353, n. 20, pps. 2107-2109 (17 Nov 2005), as quoted in the New York Times (27 Nov 2005); cf. BennettOnLife (19 Mar 2000), MoneyMechanismMeaning (15 Feb 2001), BasementWorries (15 Jun 2002), MuddlingThrough (21 Aug 2002), AikidoSpirit (9 Dec 2003), SocialWealth (18 May 2005), ...)

TopicLife - TopicSociety - 2005-11-30

(correlates: SeeingStars0, ChatTuringTest, MainGoal, ...)