E57 The Myth of Balance: What Makers Actually Need Is Harmony
Lately, I’ve been noticing how often the word balance shows up this time of year.
Balance your schedule.
Balance your energy.
Balance your creativity with the rest of your life.
It’s usually offered kindly — as a hope, or a wish, or a correction. And on the surface, it sounds reasonable. Who wouldn’t want things to feel steady and manageable?
But here’s the thing I keep running up against: balance assumes that everything deserves the same weight at the same time. And if you work with your hands — if you make things, design things, build things — you already know that’s not how real work actually functions.
Creative life isn’t symmetrical.
Some seasons pull harder than others. Some materials demand more attention. Some ideas arrive louder, heavier, more insistently — and they can’t be evenly distributed without losing something essential.
So lately, instead of asking whether my life feels balanced, I’ve been asking a different question:
Does this feel in tune?
In this episode, I want to talk about the difference between balance and harmony — not as abstract ideas, not as art principles, but as working concepts for creative life.
Balance is about equal weight.
Harmony is about relationship.
And those two ideas lead to very different expectations about how we live, how we work, and how we hold our creative ambition.
We’ll look at why seeking balance so often fails makers — not because we’re undisciplined or overcommitted, but because the model itself doesn’t match the reality of creative work.
And then I want to explore harmony as something more active and skilled: a form of ongoing judgment, attention, and tuning — the kind you already practice every time you choose fabric, adjust tension, or decide what matters most in a given season.
So let’s talk about why “Balance” may not be the most effective ask for makers
When we talk about balance, we’re usually talking about equal distribution.
Equal time.
Equal energy.
Equal attention.
Balance assumes that if we could just divide things up more evenly, everything would feel better. Calmer. More manageable.
But that assumption only works under very specific conditions — conditions that most makers don’t actually live inside.
Balance assumes stability.
It assumes predictable energy.
It assumes that the demands on you today will look roughly the same next week, or next month.
And if you work creatively — especially with your hands — you already know how rarely that’s true.
Creative work lives inside unevenness. I would say that it thrives inside unevenness!
Some ideas appear out of nowhere while others slowly develop.
Some materials require more of you — physically, mentally, emotionally.
Some seasons ask for depth, while others ask for endurance or patience.
Your capacity shifts, too.
Not because of inconsistency or lack of focus, but because you’re human — and because creative energy isn’t a flat, reliable resource you can portion out neatly.
In design terms, balance is about symmetry and equal weight. It’s about making sure nothing pulls too hard in one direction. And visually, that can feel very stable.
But creative life isn’t a static composition. It’s a living one.
When we try to apply a balance model to something that’s constantly moving — changing materials, changing seasons, changing bodies — the problem isn’t that we’re failing to keep up.
The problem is that the model itself doesn’t match the reality of the work.
Balance wants everything to quiet down and behave.
Creative work rarely does.
And when balance becomes the goal, it can quickly turn into a source of friction — because we’re measuring ourselves against an idea that was never designed for how we actually live and work.
So, if balance keeps feeling just out of reach, it’s worth pausing there — not to fix anything yet, but simply to notice that you may not be able to evenly divide what’s being asked of you in the first place.
And once you start noticing that, a different way of thinking begins to make more sense.
Instead of asking whether everything is balanced, I’ve been paying closer attention to how the parts relate to one another.
Harmony, in that sense, isn’t a feeling — and it isn’t a personality trait. It’s a way of working.
It isn’t static.
It isn’t something you achieve once and then keep.
Harmony responds.
It adjusts.
It’s tuned over time.
In design terms, harmony isn’t about giving every element the same weight. It’s about relationship — whether the parts are cooperating, whether they’re in agreement, whether they belong together right now.
And that kind of agreement doesn’t happen by accident. It’s something you practice.
If you’ve ever worked with fabric, you already know this instinctively.
A heavy wool blend doesn’t act the same as a length of linen. The weight alone changes how you cut, how you support the seams and how the garment moves once it’s finished.
Tension works the same way.
Too loose, and the structure collapses.
Too tight, and everything pulls out of alignment.
The goal isn’t equal tension everywhere — it’s appropriate tension. The kind that supports what you’re making.
Pattern pieces offer another clue. They’re rarely equal in size, shape, or responsibility. One piece carries structure. Another provides movement. Another exists almost entirely for looks.
What matters isn’t that they’re balanced — it’s that they work together.
Creative life functions much the same way.
There are seasons when one part of your work takes more energy — more focus, more physical presence, and decision-making. And other parts have to quiet down so that can happen.
Harmony isn’t about forcing those demands into neat proportions.
It’s about listening closely enough to know which part needs to lead right now — and which parts can follow without being completely abandoned.
That kind of listening takes judgment.
It takes attention.
It takes experience.
Harmony isn’t about ease.
It’s responsiveness.
It’s noticing when something has gone slightly out of tune — not because you’re doing anything wrong, but because conditions may have changed — and then making small, skilled adjustments before things go completely off the rails.
And the longer you work this way, the more fluent you become.
You stop asking whether everything is getting the same amount of time or energy, and you start asking a more useful question:
Do these parts still agree?
Asked with patience, and over time, that question is what allows creative work to remain ambitious — and sustainable.
I started noticing this difference most clearly in moments when things were genuinely competing — not in theory, but in real time.
Times when creative work, physical capacity, emotional bandwidth, and professional responsibility were all asking for something at once.
Balance would have suggested that everything deserved an equal share.
But equal wasn’t possible — and forcing it would have flattened the work, or flattened me, or both.
What helped instead was paying closer attention to which part actually needed to lead in that moment.
There have been seasons where my physical energy simply wasn’t what it used to be. In those moments, balance would have asked me to keep showing up in all the same ways, just with more discipline.
Harmony asked something completely different.
It asked me to adjust expectations without abandoning intention.
To choose fewer things, but handle them with more care.
To let one part of life quiet down temporarily so another could speak more clearly.
There were other seasons where the work itself needed go deeper rather than wider — fewer projects, more attention inside each one.
Balance would have framed that as falling behind.
Harmony framed it as composition.
Like working with a fabric that wants to be cut simply so its structure and beauty can do the talking. Nothing added. Nothing forced. Just attention applied well.
That’s the thing about harmony — it doesn’t remove effort.
It directs it.
It asks for listening instead of leveling.
Somewhere along the way, this also changed how I think about ambition.
Because ambition has a bad reputation in creative spaces — usually because it’s paired so tightly with pressure that the two seem inseparable.
But ambition itself isn’t the problem.
Like-
Wanting to make meaningful work.
Wanting to grow in skill.
Wanting to see what’s possible if you stay with something long enough.
That’s ambition.
None of that disappears when you stop chasing balance.
Harmony doesn’t make ambition smaller.
But it does make it survivable.
When ambition is composed — rather than crammed — it can be paced.
It can be sustained.
It can change shape over time without vanishing.
I know my own ambition looks different now than it did earlier in my career. Not because it faded, but because it learned something.
It learned that pressure isn’t proof of seriousness.
That constant motion isn’t the same thing as commitment.
Harmony gave ambition room to breathe without asking it to leave the room.
If you’re listening to this and silently recognizing yourself somewhere in it, there’s nothing you need to do with that right now.
Just notice.
Notice where things might be slightly out of tune — not broken, not wrong necessarily — just asking for a tiny adjustment.
Notice which demand is asking to lead, and which ones might be able to follow for a while.
Notice what becomes possible when you listen more closely instead of trying to make everything even.
No fixing.
No reorganizing.
Just attention.
This is the kind of thinking I want to return to again and again this year.
Not balance as a destination, but harmony as an ongoing practice.
Something responsive.
Something skilled.
Something that changes as conditions change.
This year doesn’t need more balance. It needs harmony – and better listening.
Until next time — keep your hands in the work and your heart in the harmonious composition.
Thanks for tuning in.
