Wednesday, August 05, 2009
Gotta keep moving
Time is running out for summer. I know that some people love the month of August, but for me its arrival serves as a reminder that autumn is on its way and that those beautiful summer sunsets that seem to last forever are coming sooner with each passing day. Soon the people who complain about the humidity and the bugs will soon begin grumbling about the cold winds of autumn and dining al fresco will become an option only for those whose inner thermostat tends to run about 10 degrees warmer than average.
This is not the sort of thing that one can fight. Time, as the saying goes, marches on whether one likes it or not. When confronting the inevitable, different people adopt various coping strategies. My preferred one these days is to focus less on the seeming lack of time left before major events, such as my departure from the Invisible Suburb or the closure of the archive where the bulk of my Ph.D. research has occurred and more on making progress on various personal projects and objectives. As long as I get something done on my dissertation, as long as I can finish making arrangements for a moving truck, as long as I can square away insurance paperwork, then I can tell myself that I have not wasted the day.
It's not a perfect system. There are evenings when I return from the archive and wonder if I could have been more efficient, if I could have photographed more laboratory notebooks for future perusal, or if this entire enterprise is doomed to consume and (perhaps) overwhelm me. How can one hope to write a dissertation with an archive that is closing and about to be shipped to...who knows where? (Delaware? Michigan?) The same doubts could apply to my upcoming move: How can one completely abandon one set of friends and social relationships behind and cast off into the unknown?
The short answer is that there are some circumstances that one simply cannot control. Awareness of these is fine. Overawareness can be paralyzing. It's fine to allow oneself to embrace time pressure as a motivating force, but one has to keep moving.
Why? Two reasons. First, because each step is a tiny, but significant act of rebellion against the inevitable. Not all of us are heroes. Despite our ambitions to actively control our fates, we are just as often subject to their whims and more often than not accept outside circumstances or use them as excuses for our ultimate decisions (or indecisions). But one can take steps, albeit small ones, to re-exert some sense of control over our lives. Any progress is a victory in this game, no matter how small.
And the second reason to keep moving? It sure as hell beats the alternative.
Time is running out for summer. I know that some people love the month of August, but for me its arrival serves as a reminder that autumn is on its way and that those beautiful summer sunsets that seem to last forever are coming sooner with each passing day. Soon the people who complain about the humidity and the bugs will soon begin grumbling about the cold winds of autumn and dining al fresco will become an option only for those whose inner thermostat tends to run about 10 degrees warmer than average.
This is not the sort of thing that one can fight. Time, as the saying goes, marches on whether one likes it or not. When confronting the inevitable, different people adopt various coping strategies. My preferred one these days is to focus less on the seeming lack of time left before major events, such as my departure from the Invisible Suburb or the closure of the archive where the bulk of my Ph.D. research has occurred and more on making progress on various personal projects and objectives. As long as I get something done on my dissertation, as long as I can finish making arrangements for a moving truck, as long as I can square away insurance paperwork, then I can tell myself that I have not wasted the day.
It's not a perfect system. There are evenings when I return from the archive and wonder if I could have been more efficient, if I could have photographed more laboratory notebooks for future perusal, or if this entire enterprise is doomed to consume and (perhaps) overwhelm me. How can one hope to write a dissertation with an archive that is closing and about to be shipped to...who knows where? (Delaware? Michigan?) The same doubts could apply to my upcoming move: How can one completely abandon one set of friends and social relationships behind and cast off into the unknown?
The short answer is that there are some circumstances that one simply cannot control. Awareness of these is fine. Overawareness can be paralyzing. It's fine to allow oneself to embrace time pressure as a motivating force, but one has to keep moving.
Why? Two reasons. First, because each step is a tiny, but significant act of rebellion against the inevitable. Not all of us are heroes. Despite our ambitions to actively control our fates, we are just as often subject to their whims and more often than not accept outside circumstances or use them as excuses for our ultimate decisions (or indecisions). But one can take steps, albeit small ones, to re-exert some sense of control over our lives. Any progress is a victory in this game, no matter how small.
And the second reason to keep moving? It sure as hell beats the alternative.
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