You Can't Have It All
There’s an old idea, carried through generations of Eastern philosophy, that a settled life draws on a balance of complementary energies — much like the elements found in nature: wood’s growth, fire’s passion, earth’s steadiness, metal’s clarity, and water’s calm. The teaching holds that a truly balanced life needs all five in some measure. And yet almost nobody’s life actually holds all five at once. Most of us carry two or three strongly, a fourth faintly, and a fifth almost not at all. That gap — the element each of us is missing — is worth paying attention to, because so much of what we chase in life turns out to be exactly what we lack.
Mostly, people work hard to live happily in their later days. Youths in their 20’s say that they have time and healthy body to enjoy their lives, but they don’t have enough money. In their 30’s and 40’s, they say they do not have time to enjoy life because they have to work for a better life in the future. In their 50’s and 60’s, they often suffer from health problems and they cannot get the same delight enjoying their lives.
In a recent study, when youths were asked whether they wanted to enjoy their life now than to work hard for a better life in their later days or vice versa, they answered that they want to enjoy their lives first. So their attitude toward life has been changed.
People try to meet both the obligation and desire of life but they seldom meet both at the same time.
Here’s what makes it harder, in this framework: even having most of these energies represented is unusually generous — plenty of people are carrying only two or three. Some run almost entirely on fire, and burn out before they slow down. Others are so full of water that they never quite commit to a direction. Some are so covered in earth that their better qualities stay buried, waiting to be dug out and shown to the world. Others grow so much wood, unchecked, that they spend their whole lives looking for something with enough metal in it to prune them back into shape.
Here is what makes this way of looking at people worth the trouble.
In many old texts, it’s said that a woman whose life is overloaded with fire — with drive, ambition, the will to win — tends to have more complicated relationships. And you might assume the opposite is true too: that a woman without much of that fire in her would simply avoid relationships altogether. But that’s not really how it works.
I received a call from a gentleman who sounded very cautious, some time ago. After asking a lot of careful questions, he finally came in to see me. At a glance I could tell he was a man of some standing — and it turned out he held an important position at his company.
In this framework, his core temperament ran heavily toward metal — precise, disciplined, exacting — with a strong current of fire underneath it, the kind that drives ambition and status. What was almost entirely missing was wood, the element that tends to represent, for a man, the women in his life.
The dominant energy in him was fire — drive, visibility, ambition. For someone built that way, power and standing at work would always be close to the center of what happiness meant to him. That fire was like a spotlight on him, the brightest thing in the room.
So for most of our conversation, we talked about his career.
Then, when we almost finished our conversation, he hesitatingly asked me a question about women. He was married, but he was not happy with his marriage life and asked me if he could meet a woman whom he could truly love.
Wood, in this framework, is the element tied to the women in a man’s life, and someone built mostly of metal, the way he was, often has almost none of it. A man missing that element tends to feel the absence instinctively, even if he can’t name it — and he goes looking for it, without always knowing why.
This is how most of us feel something lacking in our lives. People usually think that the rich must be happy. But there are hidden stories in their lives, such as distorted personal lives, family discord, unwanted marriage, or problems with children.
Are presidents happy, because they are in the highest position in a country? And how about the other upper echelons of the government? They all suffer from various hard lives, related with dishonor, maintaining their authority, and so on.
That very private agony often traces back to what’s missing — the lacking or overloaded elements underneath the surface of a life. Because none of us is complete, and what we lack often explains more about who we are than what we have.