Balancing Input and Output

Ever since my early days as a "working mother," I've thought a lot about balance. Work-life balance, as we called it then. Work-life integration as it's more commonly called today (recognizing that for working mothers the notion of real balance is a pipe dream).

As our children grew older and the demands of parenting lessened, I began to think of balance more broadly. I realized that I had, by necessity, become basically two-dimensional -- a mother first and foremost, following closely by "career woman." I'd neglected everything else. I turned my attention to trying to achieve balance between mind, body, and spirit and to balancing my typical inward-focus with nurturing relationships. 

Balance comes in many flavors. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the balance between input and output. In these last several years, I've shifted dramatically to the "input" side, leaving me feeling very unbalanced and even selfish. It is true, as Joubert says, that some of us are better suited to observing and admiring, rather than producing. Still, a woeful lack of output can feel very unsatisfying. I'm reading voraciously, but to what purpose?

At certain phases of our lives, the scales tend to tip heavily in one direction. Childhood, for example, is all about INPUT.  Like Johnny5, the robot who "came alive" in the iconic movie Short Circuit, children are faced with a big, complex, often overwhelming world and need vast amounts of input to make sense of it. But even for children, the balance is starting to tip toward more output. Educators understand that mastering a set of facts or skills and regurgitating them on a test does not guarantee that the input has been properly assimilated. Even very young children are being encouraged to consume input selectively and analytically, and to produce quality output.

Our work lives, on the other hand, focus primarily on producing output. Despite the orders-of-magnitude increase in the amount of information available on any topic, workers often feel pressured to produce output without adequate opportunity to select and analyze input. For almost everyone, your value and success is measured by what you produce. You might need input to produce output, but really, with few exceptions, no one cares about the input side. No one is checking the quality of your income as long as they are satisfied with the output.

Which brings me to retirement. Our formative years are focused primarily on input. Our career-building years are focused primarily on output. And then? In retirement, we have the opportunity -- the luxury -- to tip the scales back toward input. Reading, going to lectures, attending theater and concerts, even travel. All input. And there isn't anything inherently wrong with any of that. But, as E.L. Konigsburg wisely observed, sometimes all that input just needs to come out:

I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.  

And that's why I'm writing again. The luxury of reading voraciously has started to feel like an indulgence. And it feels ineffective because I'm not taking the time to analyze and internalize it. Output doesn't have to mean producing content for the world. People have used journals for eons to record their thoughts and process the day's "input." Perhaps a silver lining of sheltering at home during this COVID-19 crisis is that I'll achieve a better input-output balance.