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Reason and Passion
Creating the Balance
By Azim Jamal www.azimjamal.com
Your reason and passion are the rudder and the sails of the seafaring soul,” wrote Kahlil Gibran, the Lebanese-born philosopher, poet, and painter who wrote magnificently in both English and Arabic. “If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.”
An equilibrium between reason and passion – between head and heart – is one of the essentials of Life Balance. It has been said that when the mind and the heart go to war, the body becomes the battlefield.
The mind allows us to think, to reason, and to apply our wisdom to make a difference. The heart is where we feel. Through it, we love and use our creativity without inhibition. When we merge education of the mind with education of the heart, we strike a dynamic balance. We look with “both eyes” – the eye of the heart and the eye of the mind. We look at life as a whole, realizing that one element affects the other.
The Dalai Lama, spiritual leader of the Tibetan people, explains that happiness comes from being balanced. He emphasizes that education without the balance of a warm heart can be dangerous and can bring unhappiness.
Jesus taught that happiness belonged to the meek, the merciful, and the peaceable. But in driving the moneychangers from the temple, he showed that these qualities must be balanced with boldness. Paul showed faith in this principle when he spoke of his gentle approach to dealing with the congregation but his boldness in dealing with its adversaries.
Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel peace prize laureate and first black Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa, stresses the importance of a balance in our relationships with others.
“In our African language,” he notes, “we say, ‘a person is a person through other persons.’ I would not know how to be a human being at all, except I learned this from other human beings. We are made for a delicate network of relationships, of interdependence. We are meant to complement each other…. not even the most powerful nation can be completely self-sufficient.”
Reason without passion is lame, and passion without reason is blind. Reason alone is dull, whereas passion alone can lead to destruction. When we marry the two, we have a wonderful synergy. Our reasoning protects us from doing silly things. Our passion gives us the drive to excel and go the distance. Reason draws from the mind, passion from the heart.
Home vs. Career
The balancing of home and career is the most common challenge executives face.
Many feel compelled to make a choice between home and career. Life Balance will make that stark choice unnecessary.
Technology was supposed to increase leisure time, presumably freeing us to spend more time with our families and less on the job. But technological progress seems to have brought us more things to do and less time in which to do them.
A study by Health Canada shows that almost 60% of Canadians who are employed outside the home cannot balance work and family demands. Most give higher priority to their work than they do to their families. This is not uncommon in many countries.
Flextime, which allows people the flexibility to schedule work time around family time, has been a major help in balancing family and work. Flextime, for example, might enable an employee to work 90% of a normal week for 90% of the pay. This could be enough to allow a parent to spend time with children after school. Flextime could also mean taking every other Friday off or working from home one day a week.
Flextime is especially helpful for double-duty mothers or fathers who frequently are victims of role overload. Life for them can be a daily grind of cooking and cleaning, supervising homework, driving children to school, looking after elderly parents, and running endless errands in addition to earning a living.
We’re living now in the age of burn-out, in which workaholics pursue frenetic lifestyles that hog their time, drain their resources, and leave them empty and unfulfilled. Many people engage in activity for activity’s sake, burying themselves in work or play to avoid facing real personal and spiritual needs.
Others are in love with money, and seek to express that love by spending all their waking hours pursuing their careers.
But truly successful people know that balance is essential to achievement, and they make room for quality time for family, friends, spiritual interests, and hobbies.
Lee Iacocca, as president of the Ford Division of Ford Motor Company and CEO of Chrysler, put in long days on the job. But he was also committed to staying home every weekend, enjoying time with his family, going to church, and reflecting on his life and times. A true leader is one who is holistic and balanced.
From Life Balance the Sufi Way by Azim Jamal and Nido Qubein. Azim Jamal is the No. 1 Amazon Bestselling Co-Author of The Power of Giving: How Giving Back Enriches Us All (published by Penguin). Now available on Amazon and at major bookstores.
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