sunshine after all
Thanks to all who commented on the last post; I'm not up to responding to comments individually, but please know that I read and appreciated every one, and the emails as well.
I feel like I've been underwater for the last three months and am finally surfacing only to discover that the boat's gone down while I was otherwise occupied. My students, predictably, are the best life raft I could ask for. I feel a little guilty about that -- how can they be so awesome when I so clearly don't deserve it right now? -- but I am deeply grateful for them, for their intelligence and patience and goodwill, and I am trying to trust that I will be able to live up to them sooner rather than later.
I am going to have to do some teaching-related and work-related stuff this weekend, because the backlog there is kind of making me want to hide under the bed. But I've been running on fumes for weeks now, so I also need to refuel a bit. And since the weather's lovely, that means going out to spend a good bit of the day in my garden. One of my colleagues is bringing her young daughters over this morning so they can pick raspberries; I'm going to weed the strawberries and plant some long-neglected shrubs that have been sitting forlornly in their pots at the edge of the driveway.
And this evening I'm going to start remastering "Goodbye," the FNL vid that premiered at VVC, because I like that vid and I want to be able to watch it without wincing at glitches, and also because I want to make it available for download in the indeterminate but hopefully not too distant future.
I keep reminding myself that living a balanced life is not something one achieves; it's an ongoing process of negotiation and adjustment and self-calibration. But those things are -- well, they're difficult, and these days I mostly feel tired and sad and not up to the task. So I have also been reminding myself that I can't help how I feel, but I can help how I behave.
Years ago a friend sent me a card that said "I refuse to be ruled by the tyranny of immediacy; I make choices." I stuck it to my computer monitor and it was one of the things that got me through the final death-march of my dissertation. I am thinking of it again today (and wondering where it ended up in the course of the various interim home and office moves) and taking a deep breath and choosing -- to go out and dig in the dirt, to come inside at dusk and be creative, to read and think about the essays I am asking my students to read and think about, to call someone I care about with whom I haven't spoken in too long, to sit for a while with one of the three remaining cats on my lap. Because the fact that I am tired and sad doesn't make the rest of the world I love mean less.
comments on Dreamwidth || Leave a comment at Dreamwidth || How to use OpenID
I feel like I've been underwater for the last three months and am finally surfacing only to discover that the boat's gone down while I was otherwise occupied. My students, predictably, are the best life raft I could ask for. I feel a little guilty about that -- how can they be so awesome when I so clearly don't deserve it right now? -- but I am deeply grateful for them, for their intelligence and patience and goodwill, and I am trying to trust that I will be able to live up to them sooner rather than later.
I am going to have to do some teaching-related and work-related stuff this weekend, because the backlog there is kind of making me want to hide under the bed. But I've been running on fumes for weeks now, so I also need to refuel a bit. And since the weather's lovely, that means going out to spend a good bit of the day in my garden. One of my colleagues is bringing her young daughters over this morning so they can pick raspberries; I'm going to weed the strawberries and plant some long-neglected shrubs that have been sitting forlornly in their pots at the edge of the driveway.
And this evening I'm going to start remastering "Goodbye," the FNL vid that premiered at VVC, because I like that vid and I want to be able to watch it without wincing at glitches, and also because I want to make it available for download in the indeterminate but hopefully not too distant future.
I keep reminding myself that living a balanced life is not something one achieves; it's an ongoing process of negotiation and adjustment and self-calibration. But those things are -- well, they're difficult, and these days I mostly feel tired and sad and not up to the task. So I have also been reminding myself that I can't help how I feel, but I can help how I behave.
Years ago a friend sent me a card that said "I refuse to be ruled by the tyranny of immediacy; I make choices." I stuck it to my computer monitor and it was one of the things that got me through the final death-march of my dissertation. I am thinking of it again today (and wondering where it ended up in the course of the various interim home and office moves) and taking a deep breath and choosing -- to go out and dig in the dirt, to come inside at dusk and be creative, to read and think about the essays I am asking my students to read and think about, to call someone I care about with whom I haven't spoken in too long, to sit for a while with one of the three remaining cats on my lap. Because the fact that I am tired and sad doesn't make the rest of the world I love mean less.
comments on Dreamwidth || Leave a comment at Dreamwidth || How to use OpenID