The beauty of the Balance Sheet is in its clean demarcations and sharp clarities. The summarized ledger: the readable picture. Momentarily, we are distracted from the ongoing accounting of profits and loss at the financial-emotional border. Momentarily, we are distracted from the calculations of cash flow that accompany us through the solvencies and insolvencies of each present minute.

On balance, this year has underlined the necessity for emotional asset diversification. By this, I mean, the considered inventory of the skills and attributes (large and small) that contribute to our individual well-being. While we often strive for the big picture: the career, the concise elevator pitch, the complete narrative, we generally operate with considerably less— which, ironically, may provide a much greater yield of gratification. Herbert Simon called this “satisficing”— those realistic and practical patch-works of what gets us through together with what we must sacrifice in getting through, as we proceed stepwise, across our days.

Spreading out our emotional assets before ourselves, we seek to weave meaning between their pieces. Mary Catherine Bateson referred to this, some years back, as “composing” a life. My Dublin colleague, Annette Clancy, thinks of this as an act of curatorship. And, indeed, both composing and curating require high recognition both of the individual parts and the desired whole: and each suggests the continuing evolution of the works in progress- our lives.

During periods of difficulty, our emotional horizons sometimes contract: but remembering the centrality of ongoing creations, of the momentary sequences of satisfice together with periods of joyous recollection—- these give meaning and purpose to our acts.

The rituals that mark our lives, with their regularity, are all cultures’ allowances for this kind of integration. They extend to each of us the cultural equivalent of a balance sheet, to integrate where we’ve been and where we might be heading— as we continue our personal and familial compositions, adding and subtracting to the ongoing acts of our curated lives.

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