Some Thoughts on Work and Rest

I grew up with the belief that anything worth doing was worth doing well as an important part of my worldview,
and not much has changed about that. Happily, my sense of what I can handle has improved. As a highschooler my interests lay in pretty much everything, and I did well with most everything I tried, which was too much: soccer, volunteering at church, piano and voice lessons, choir, community college classes, 4-H horticulture identification contests. The only thing I ever tried and then gave up because it was too much was clarinet lessons.

I kept up the same frenetic pace in my undergraduate years (all three of them), with a heavy credit load (one semester I only took 18 credits), minors in Bible, Greek, and Music, and the Honors program, but I did give up double-majoring rather than stay a fourth year. Though I never developed a coffee habit, it took me a couple years after college to get caught up on sleep again. My masters program was four terms in a row, summer-fall-spring-summer, and I worked part-time while I finished it.

Things really didn't slow down for me until my first semester in my PhD program, about a month after I had gotten my master's, although I was getting ready for my wedding at the same time I tried to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up (or at least what area of philosophy to specialize in) and adjust to a new program. My (wiser) husband convinced me that we shouldn't get into too many extracurriculars during our first year of marriage, and we mostly limited things to school and church.

Since then, we've been through second-shift work schedules, employment via piecemeal adjunct work, pitching in as church treasurer and music director in a pinch, and two years of parenting. This summer was the first time in a few years that we were able to return to a more relaxed pace, and I've been truly enjoying it. I've been working steadily at my dissertation, and was shocked to realize the other day that I've written nearly three chapters since January. But we've had a lot of good time to relax, enjoying trips to parks, libraries, museums, and the zoo with our daughter, and even fairly regular weekend visits to see family.

I still believe that if something is worth doing, it's worth doing well. I've slowly become more of a self-starter, learning the discipline needed to manage my work. I'm less likely to get into unhealthy cycles (warning, strong language) of procrastination, hard work, and exhaustion. (Parenting and being a professional academic don't allow for the procrastinating-and-relying-on-your-smarts-to-get-by technique that worked for me before.)

I value recreation and relaxation more than ever. For me, it means activities like enjoying fiction (I admit to some escapism in this regard, especially after I've used up my dealing-with-people reserves), gardening, and scrapbooking. It means scheduling my writing/research time so that I can play with my daughter without feeling like I should be working, and taking care of myself so that I enjoy doing so instead of being exhausted. I'm still learning, but this is progress.