Day 19: "Balance"

Tales of a divided heart

This week I was traveling for work and unable to play or record as much, using my daily #100DaysOfDemos practice first to finalize this song, then to explore some lyrical horizons on the days I wasn’t near a guitar or studio equipment. On Thursday I borrowed office space, a recording boom mic, and this vintage Gretsch “Sparkle Jet” from a dear old friend, Daley Hake, to self record a few demo takes. Here’s the most interesting take (I slip up on the last line, so I reprise it to land the jet, so to speak):

Lyrics

Balance
© Troy Bronsink 2026

born with a spoon in her mouth
in a palace
‘fell for a girl who goes by Alice
turned the station-wagon off
took a call from Dallas
I deserve a woman whose heart’s in balance

string together memories
string together rhymes
taking a sip of Early Times

She said I promised her somethin’
then gave-her another
She deserves a man with the heart of a mother

took vows in front’a strangers
to take ‘er as my wife
years of good neighbors to break the ice
stole love like hilltops of Appalachian coal
black lung and the radio

rolled up the red carpet spring after spring
I’d find a couple smarties and an earring
car pool, gold watch, tight shoe callous
I deserve a woman whose heart’s in balance

she deserves a man that can pull it together
I was just a man
with my head in the feathers
Dallas called, said they pull some strings
Tired of workin for them,
this ain’t workin for me

it’s a Monday
it’s a Monday again
and Sunday’s
a long time coming

you came along and you loved me good
you learned what I wished
I did what I could `
apron strings and honeydos
you deserve a man that can follow through

I wanna know when I hold you true
its okay to say ‘I don’t know what to do’
Dallas left a message, with their regrets
hell, I deserve just what I get

I wanna hold her hand so tight
like the movie pictures with-them headlights
but she holds her lips just shy of my mouth
Wish I had a woman I can figure out

It’s a Monday again
But Sunday’s a long time coming.

she put a spoon in my mouth,
my wonder eyed Alice
led me blind-folded Through a
home-made palace
all I gave her was wishes and railroad ballads
she deserves a man whose heart’s in balance

Belonging, Not Balancing

On Tuesday I flew to Southern California to meet colleagues in the Community Initiatives network, and I’m writing this now (Friday) on a layover in… you guessed it, Dallas (DFW).

With CI, on Wednesday I had the heart-filling privilege of facilitating a day-long co-learning lab on Belonging and Civic Muscle with the Inland Empire Vital Conditions Network—more than 60 area leaders from philanthropy, human services, social change, and activism.

We explored how the body keeps score, and how our personality identifications—surviving by clinging—can actually create disconnection and lower the Wi-Fi signal between teammates, partner agencies, and strangers or outsiders in our conversations. So often this devolves into likemindedness, urgency, and burnout.

We practiced ways to reconnect inside: Three-Centered Awareness, the RAIN method, and interpersonal practices like Nonviolent Communication and Reflect–Honor–Connect.

We revisited the great realization that when systems fail, communities rise¹. Belonging is a commitment, and cherishing the journey of the self and our neighbors is where the real reward lies.

Poet, David Whyte, in his book The Three Marriages, describes the modern myth of balance that actually breeds disconnection:

“Human beings are creatures of belonging, though they may come to that sense of belonging only through long periods of exile and loneliness. Interestingly, we belong to life as much through our sense that it is all impossible, as we do through the sense that we will accomplish everything we have set out to do. This sense of belonging and not belonging is lived out by most people through three principal dynamics… the three marriages, of Work, Self and Other.

We can call these three separate commitments marriages because at their core they are usually lifelong commitments and … they involve vows made either consciously or unconsciously… To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.

…

We should stop thinking in terms of work-life balance. Work-life balance is a concept that has us simply lashing ourselves on the back and working too hard in each of the three commitments. In the ensuing exhaustion we ultimately give up on one or more of them to gain an easier life.”²

The evening after our learning lab I went up the hill to Crestline, California, to meet a friend I hadn’t seen in fourteen years.

Daley Hake is a family man, the de facto mayor of his 10,000-person town, and a gifted producer and agency director. When we knew each other he was a teenage and young 20-something rock star and photographer who would pass through Atlanta, crash on our couch—short respites between tours to parts unknown, recording documentaries with Jay-Z, playing guitar with Katy Perry, and moonlighting in megachurch worship bands. I wish I could find a photo of us with Daley from that time, but here are a couple of his photos of us from a visit c. 2008:

20 Years Later

Now twenty years older than when we first met, Daley and I sat on the porch of a modest guest cabin looking out over Silverwood Lake toward Apple Valley (home of many Hollywood Westerns), recounting the weariness of the road, the career he left because of burnout at age twenty-five, and the joy and purpose he’s found in bringing relationship, work, and his own life into conversation.

All these folks—consultants, activists, city planners, artists, strangers next to me in my exit-row flight—remind me there’s really no such thing as balance. Balance is a cruel, externally imposed ideal that parts of us use to create distance from life. Life, on the other hand, is always washing around, moving through commitment to commitment, taking our blindfolded parts, hand-in-hand and walking us further in.

What’s far better than putting our commitments in competition with one another—criticizing our imbalanced lives with shame or rigor—is the wonder-eyed choice to delight in belonging to one another.

Monday comes around and we realize… the weekend is a long way off.

The finish line is not the reward.

This is the place where living happens—loss, joy, change—all of it.

1. Grace Lee Boggs, in her book: The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, writes “Movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.”

2. David Whyte, The Three Marriages (2021: Riverhead Books). Italics/bold added