Its not like this is a new post… I’ve been struggling with the work/life balance thing for a while now. From an early age my father always stressed the importance of working hard and playing hard. Thinking back on his life I mostly remember him working hard, but now I guess I realize that he really did play hard, too – he did really like his big, flashy, and expensive toys and playing with them.
Me, well, life has been crappy for the past two and a half weeks for a variety of reasons – none of them writing related, however – and I’ve been neglecting that balance. I’ve been pushing myself in terms of my work because that is something I can manage. I can write sentences and paragraphs, accomplish tasks, see documents grow and “to do” lists shrink. Those are good feelings even when the list seems never ending.
Life, well, I’ve been neglecting it. I have not gone running in nearly two weeks. I have not been out to poetry in I can’t even remember how long. I have had dinner with friends a few times and seen some people, but for the most part when the work has been done for the day I simply want to curl up and hide. Part of this is seasonal/weather related – who wants to get up at 5:15am and go running when it is this cold outside and still soooo dark!?!?! – but this is much larger than winter. I feel this almost constant need to be doing my work for if I am not doing work, than clearly I am a slacker. I wonder if this is about getting more of a life, which I had and still do have back on the coast, or just a very hard lesson I am going to have to learn at some point in my academic career. How do you balance things?