On the Stovetop

Last fall, David Sedaris (of NPR fame — oh, the Santaland Diaries!) had a piece in The New Yorker that featured both his quintessential, quirky humor and this serious gem of a management-training-seminar analogy:

[S]he invited us to picture a four-burner stove…  This was not a real stove but a symbolic one…  “One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work.”  The gist, she said, was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners.  And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.

Many of us (particularly, it seems, those of us in the academy, and particularly, it seems, those of us who are women) labor under the delusion that we can (or at least should try to) have it all, all at once.  We’ve somehow come to believe that it’s a shortcoming on our part if we fail to excel on all fronts — work, family, friends, and health — at all times.

My guarantee to you: if all four of your burners are turned to high for an extended time, at least one pot will boil over.  And how!  Over a year ago, I nearly charred myself into a pile of ashes trying to keep all four burners roaring.

Since then, I’ve come ’round to the liberating view that turning off one burner (or at least dialing it down to low — way low!) is actually an admirable, not lamentable, action.  And my life and my health are much better for it!

If all four of your burners are set to roil, consider giving yourself permission to turn one down.  (Just try not to make it your health, okay?)

If your standards are exceedingly high, it’s true that success may require one burner to be turned off completely.

But in my experience, high expectations can be more crippling than empowering, and a very good life can be had from adjusting all four burners until they maintain, collectively, a merry, gentle simmer.  But if one begins to boil (and inevitably, one will — that’s just life), another must be set to cool!

And so, today, I’d like to say “Thank you” to David Sedaris.  I never dreamed that the man behind Crumpet the Elf would be the one to save me from my overextended self just in time, but he was!