Get The Balance Right

As you may be able to tell if you’ve been reading this blog, I have a tendency to refer often to music. It’s because I love listening to music. I am constantly listening at home, at work, out walking , riding the subway or a plane. (The only forbidden place is on my bike.)

I also watch any rockumentary, VH-1 Behind The Music, etc. even if I know very little about the musicians. The other day I watched a documentary called New York Doll. The description on Netflix read “tells the story of glam-rock-punk band the New York Dolls, from their meteoric rise to their drug-and-alcohol-riddled demise.” It has a 4-star rating. So I thought sure, I’ll watch it.

I was never a New York Dolls fan though. In fact, I could not tell you much about them except they influenced the 70’s CBGB crowd in NYC and their lead singer is David Johansen, who later found fame under the alias Buster Poindexter and in supporting movie roles. Logically it didn’t make any sense for me not to listen to them; I’m a big fan of Bowie, The Stooges & the CBGB 70’s scene.

The documentary skims over the entire Dolls story though and focuses mainly on the bassist, Arthur Kane. Arthur is the Doll to the farthest left on the cover of their 1973 album. By 2004, Arthur was a recovering alcoholic, devoted to the Mormon church and working as a librarian. While watching this movie, you could not imagine a more unassuming person. I had no idea they were speaking with a former rock star or a former Doll until after a couple of minutes when Kane’s name appeared on the screen. He spoke with no arrogance, humbly riding the bus and expressing serious concern about doing a good job as a librarian.

Yet he still thinks about the days as a Doll as his fondest memories and longs for a reconciliation with his former friends. He doesn’t exhibit any strange obsessions with this. They don’t show him prattling on as is if his best days are behind him or portray him as being in some mental rut. Instead he is portrayed as having a focus, some type of inexplicable unsaid purpose.

This really comes to light when from out of the blue, the musician Morrissey is commissioned as the 2004 “curator” of the annual Meltdown Festival in London and invites the Dolls to reunite for a one-off show. Even though he had months to prepare, he still had to raise money to buy his bass guitar back from a pawn shop and then had only a week of rehearsals with the band, a band he had not seen for 30 years. Knowing all that had happened to him with the alcoholism, the beating he sustained during the Rodney King riots, the impoverished conditions of his life, along with the entire string of bad luck that had been his life, it did not seem possible that he would pull this off.

Yet what you see in this movie is a guy so focused in the moment. He’s not thinking about the past or the future. He’s thinking about this moment now. This job now that has to be finished. Granted it would be easy for them to go onstage, to sloth about, to rest on their laurels, to take what cash they were getting and go home. Why should they bother working for this? Where is the glory? They’re not going to reunite. No one’s going to throw buckets of money their way for a reunion tour. The glory was in that sole moment of completing that job, right then.

After the show, Arthur returns to the States. Twenty-two days later, he feels ill and decides to go to the emergency room. He is diagnosed with Leukemia. Arthur dies two days later.

When this bombshell hits, my jaw hits the floor and I think how horrible. This guy is just getting his life back and then it’s gone. But then on second thought, no, what a complete life he had. Despite all the hardship, he pulled it together in the end and came full circle.

All of this makes me think about the many articles I have been reading about work/life balance. For me, the ideas I hear on work/life balance are similar to standing on an upside down bosu ball. If you’re focused and strong, you can stay balanced. Any change to your internal or external environment, you fall in one direction. You get balanced again; you fall to the side again. Repeat, over and over. As a result, you never get anywhere. You stay in one spot and just bounce from one side to another.

So I have wondered lately, due in part to Kane’s story, does work/life balance even really exist? Isn’t it all just life? Isn’t life just a combination of things we like to do and things we don’t like to do, with the hope there is more “like” than “dislike”? Perhaps the phrase work/life balance is just words made up by HR to show employees we care so as to keep retention rates up.

I decree there is no work/life balance. There is only life. And life is really a journey, made up of good and bad. Work is part of that journey. And if you can get the journey to come full circle, then that is the true balance.

R.I.P. Arthur Kane