A Celebrated Return

Tuesday May 31, 2016

When you spend all of your perceived time jumping from one activity to another that you feel has to be done, you lose something. For me, it has been the satisfaction of creating and reading. I get great pleasure from both - but only when they are not in competition with activities that I have to do or that need to be done.

Let's be honest though - I work 56 hours a week for a fire department and take 4-6 credit hours a quarter of graduate work (which will nominally last until the end of next summer.) But when graduate school is over, will some other activity artificially take my time and keep me from creating and reading? Probably, unless I purposefully fight against it.

My lovely girlfriend dragged me away from work and school on a 3-day trip that also provided time away from electronics. I got to nap, go to bed early, wake up when I wanted, have a few drinks, and read. I finished reading The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, which I had put down halfway finished a year ago, nominally because school does not give me time to read anything else. It took maybe 4 hours of concentrated reading to complete. What a joy to finish a book. I always have a sense of eagerness right near the end - what's the ending going to be? What's the ultimate point? Is the author going to address this point or that? And I also get a feeling of accomplishment - the satisfaction of a completed task.

I think it is easy to forget these pleasures when we get consumed by the day to day hustle - especially if we have the privilege of doing work we feel is important or purposeful. It is also easy to forget when we - much more commonly it seems these days - work incessantly because we have to survive, to make it to that next paycheck doing work we couldn't care about less.

I took finishing The True Believer as a catalyst to make that time for personal projects. Looking at the time I spend, there is a lot of space to focus and accomplish. I've got multiple writing projects that are progressing (I promise,) I've gotten back in the clay studio - since apparently there is a clay co-op directly across the street from me that I was unaware of for a year, and there is a whole stack of books that I've collected since starting school that are on my "to read" list - including Hoffer's next two books.

Summary: It is finally warm out again, I finished a good book, I think I am shaking the winter funk at the end of spring this year. Time to accomplish and do.