Europeans, who take four-to-six-week annual holidays while also managing to have jobs and families, seem to come naturally to work/life balance. Yet somehow Americans can’t seem to get it right.
I used to think it was all about boundaries—about turning off the cell phone, leaving work at the office, and making time for vacations. I now think it’s just the opposite, that it’s not about respecting boundaries at all, but rather about letting your various vocations and identities commingle so that it’s sometimes hard to tell when you’re working and when you’re just living.
It’s ironic that it took me so long to figure this out. For a big chunk of my childhood, my family lived above a motel that my parents owned. In those years, there was no separation between work and the rest of our lives. Dinner was routinely interrupted by the ring of the buzzer downstairs, beckoning one of us to answer the call and take twenty minutes to check in a guest or deal with an overflowing toilet. Once the night clerk arrived, we were technically free, but my father and mother were never really off duty. A guest could have a health emergency or the night clerk could turn out to have a drinking problem, and suddenly they were back in work mode.
When my parents socialized, they did it at home by hosting dinner parties or poker games, never venturing too far from the business. Friends and family pitched in at the front desk. If company visited, I took them across the street to the beach. And when my mom had an errand for me, I came back from the beach and ran to the store in my bathing suit and flip-flops. When I needed a haircut, my father broke out his scissors in the kitchen and propped me up on the counter by the sink; he had been a hairdresser for twenty years and in our household he never gave up that role. I was about twenty-five when I had my first haircut by a stranger (by then they were called hair stylists). Now that I think of it, the social part of our lives was indistinguishable from the work. The staff and guests at our motels were just the people who populated our life.
When I graduated from college, I was determined to have a job I could walk away from at the end of the day, so I went to law school. For nearly a decade, I worked as a corporate lawyer in the kind of life I thought I wanted. When I left the office, even if it was late, I left the work behind, and then my personal life began. For a while this worked, but soon I felt like I had one identity at work and another one the moment I left the office. I didn’t feel integrated at all. The moments of real pleasure I experienced at work were when I let parts of my outside life seep in, like when I used the perks of corporate life to feed my travel itch. I planned trips for my bosses, hosted international colleagues, and raised my hand for conferences and out-of-town meetings. Whenever I did these things, my life felt more integrated.
When I became a writer, being myself came naturally. The work I do consists of things I’d do even if no one paid me. When I travel, I often find a way to publish something about my trip. When I want to learn about something, I write an article about it. When I teach, moderate panels, or speak to groups of people, I’m often being paid to mentor, something I enjoy and do for free on a regular basis. Now, whether I’m writing, teaching, speaking, reading, or getting together with others in the world of words, I usually can’t tell the difference between my work and my life.
When I talk to Angela Williams, the lawyer/minister, about this, she calls it leading an “authentic life.” As she put it, “If you are in touch with who you are, willing to allow people to see you for who you really are, and willing to be really vulnerable, that’s what makes you authentic and that’s what allows you to bridge the gap between the personal and the community, the secular and spiritual. I have been graced with opportunity to move in a number of different settings, from prisons to boardrooms and every segment of my life is intertwined. When you weave the threads of your life together, the whole of you comes out.”
Many of the people in this book live slash lives out of a desire to pursue multiple paths simultaneously. They do it to nurture competing interests, to develop diverse talents, or to satisfy an incredibly curious and restless nature. But for legions of others, there is no choice but to slash. If you’re a single or working parent, for example, a slash life isn’t an option, it’s a necessity.
Still, in the end I believe we are all slashes by necessity. After all, who can answer the question “What do you do?” with a singular response? And why would we want to? 