Balance

What does success really mean? Why do we chase the goals we chase, and who decided they were worth chasing in the first place? These are the kinds of questions that make most people uncomfortable. And I get it. Difficult philosophical questions breed anxiety. They slow you down. So we simplify. We pick a target on the horizon and walk toward it. For anyone raised in the world of achievers, that path feels natural, even noble. It's never easy, but it's convenient. It gives life a shape.

I've worked hard since I was fourteen. But I have always been the person asking why.

Why grind? Why bite the dirt so everyone knows you are strong? How much of what we call ambition is really just a hunger for social approval dressed up in the language of purpose? I find myself suspicious of goals that were handed to me before I had the chance to question them, goals that exist to confirm, above all else, that I matter, that I am powerful, that my life carries enormous meaning. These are statements we feed the deepest, most fragile part of the ego. And I'm not sure they lead anywhere worth going.

I also find it hard to take seriously the modern culture of so-called "work-life balance." In a world built entirely around stimulating and overstimulating demand for everything from new toothpaste and plane ticket upgrades to Pilates classes, sneaker technology, and weight loss programs, balance has been reduced to a lifestyle product. It is something you buy, schedule, and optimize. The system is elegant in its way: work to consume, consume to forget, forget to keep working. It goes through crises, it adapts, and it keeps going. There's almost something evolutionary about it.

But real balance, the kind I find genuinely compelling, has nothing to do with wellness trends. It lives at the foundation of everything. In atoms and electronics. In solar systems and galaxies. It is not a goal you reach. It is a principle you practice. And I try, imperfectly, to bring that principle into my life, to not lose myself entirely in any single pursuit while ignoring everything else that makes life worth living.

I found that practice, unexpectedly, in the work I chose for myself.

I run a private chef service, intimate weddings, personal celebrations, moments that people will carry with them for the rest of their lives. And I find it genuinely, practically balanced in a way that the traditional fine dining path never was. In a restaurant kitchen, you surrender yourself to repetition and hierarchy. You grind your mental and physical health down to nothing in service of someone else's vision, someone else's name above the door. The industry romanticizes that sacrifice.

What I do instead is different. Every event brings a different menu, a different set of people, a different story I'm being invited into. I balance my craft by constantly moving through cuisines, techniques, and skills, things my mentors taught me and things I keep teaching myself through the books written by the chefs I admire. There is no stagnation. There is no ceiling built by someone else's ego.

And then there is something beyond the cooking itself. From the very first conversation with a client, I am present, not just as a chef, but as a participant in something that matters to them. I help shape a memory. I become, quietly, a small part of their story. That kind of connection, between what I make and what someone feels, is its own form of balance. It grounds the craft in something human.

And yet, for all the balance I have built into my life, there remains one place where I have never even tried.

Except when it comes to love.

Here, I abandon every principle I just described. Words like partner sound to me like legal language, someone you enter into a contract with, exchanging valuable goods for mutual benefit. That has never been love to me. In love, I dive without a parachute. I always have.

Maybe that is the truest thing I can say about myself: I have spent my whole life looking for balance, in philosophy, in work, in the way I move through the world. And I have found it, more or less, in all of those places. But love has never been a place for balance. It has always been the one beautiful exception. The place where I stop thinking, stop questioning, and simply fall, completely, and without a plan.

Some things are not meant to be balanced. They are meant to be felt.