It sure has been a long time since I wrote anything. The topic is something I had a chance to first analyze a few years ago. I had reached a good balance at some point and was able to keep it that way for a while. Recently my balance was temporarily broken and I refined my thoughts about the topic. Here they are...
A well balanced lifestyle is something, which is very important to every human being. A lot of people live all their lives trying to get to the moment of bliss, where they are happy about every aspect of their life. Some people succeed partially, some fail. While I think that reaching perfect balance is impossible, one should try to come to it as close as possible. Understanding how to do it and the process of reaching it can be very useful in gaining a perspective on your life. It can show what one lacks in life and what must be done to improve the overall feeling about one's life.
What I'm talking about is not a minute or two of happiness. One can induce such temporary happiness by tricking brain either via some chemical process (e.g. alcohol, drugs) or by directing every bit of brain activity to some addictive process (e.g. hobby). It is important to understand that such temporary happiness can never replace overall long lasting satisfaction in life. There are a lot of people, who are going that wrong route, but end up ruining their lives completely by becoming alco|worko -holics. Every human being wants to feel happy, however, most, instead of focusing on correcting the root of unhappiness or incompleteness, try to avoid thinking about it. I strongly believe that overall long lasting satisfaction from life comes from a good balanced of four major items and I will attempt to explain my personal take on it.
As I just mentioned, I think there are four components, among which each person must find good balance. Let me explain each one in detail.
Physical health You must be healthy to be happy. It is as easy as that. But it is not all, there is more to it. Each member of your family must be healthy to be able to reach a healthy emotional environment(see component #2 below). When someone in a family is sick, it affects the overall emotional health. Unfortunately, sometimes this component is the only one you can not control. It really is sad that people reach the peak of their physical health much sooner than they reach the peak of their intelligence. Very often physical health is damaged by careless actions before a person reaches maturity to realize the long-term effects of such actions.
Personal life This component is basically an emotional environment one lives in. This environment is what closest people(family) create around that person. In a healthy emotional environment one always finds shelter and cure from external problems. A healthy emotional environment cures and replenishes one's energy and excitement about life; recharges emotionally, so to say.
It is quite obvious that such an environment is not readily available when one reaches adulthood, he/she must invest into building one. How to do it is a one million question, which is different from person to person. The rule of thumb is that the emotional environment is healthy when each member of the family is emotionally healthy. Therefore, it is obvious that if one wants to build and/or maintain a healthy personal life, emotional state of other members of the family must be improved to or maintained at a relatively high level.
It all sounds easy, but in reality it is very hard to achieve. Physical health can negatively affect it(see component #2 above). Also, personal life can be, and often is, affected by the third component, which is:
Financial stability There is so much each one of us can say about money. I don't want to repeat what everybody knows already. What I want to stress though is
how much money you are making is not what's important, what's important is how financially stable you are. An absolute figure in itself doesn't mean a thing. It all depends on the
income - spending = savings formula. You can earn millions, but if you spend more than you earn, you are in trouble. And not just you, your family is also in trouble. If you are not stable financially, your emotional environment will be negatively affected. So, it is important to understand the dependency and act wisely not to damage component #2.
Social environment This is the environment, where you interface with people other than your immediate family members. That's the component, that lets you measure yourself against other people. It surrounds you everywhere, where you get to know other people: at work, in church, at parties, etc. This is different from person to person, depending on what the person's aspiration and ambitions are. The environment has a tendency to change depending on a multitude of factors (e.g. maturity, geographical location, exposure, individual properties and so on).
So, here are the four components, which one should improve and find good balance among to get more satisfaction from life. An unbalanced life will never produce long lasting satisfaction. You can have all the money in the world, but without an emotionally healthy family you will never be happy. Similarly, you can be healthy as a bull, but without financial stability you will not be satisfied with life. All these components must coexist and none of them must be ignored. There should be enough time dedicated to develop and improve each one.
Reaching the state of absolute long lasting happiness is probably impossible. There are always ups and downs caused by a variety of factors, which are often out of your control. However,
if one wants to live his/her life to the fullest - physical health, personal life, financial stability and social environment must not be overlooked.
