Last week I had this fantasy that after four glorious unstructured days, I would return to work with a spring in my step and energized for all the work I left on my desk. The brainfog I was experiencing was entirely a result of the exhaustion caused by trying to run the event and still do everything else I had on my plate. I just needed some sleep and some time in my house and to get my life in order, and everything would fall into place.
Indeed, I had four glorious unstructured days. I took myself to the coffee shop. I had dinner with friends. I cleaned the house and worked on the lawn. (Edging! Why did no one ever tell me that edging makes everything look better even when the center of the lawn is two feet tall and hiding my dog?) I set up Quicken and had minor panic attacks about money. I took the lethargic, sick cat to the vet only to spend $360 to find out all her tests came back normal and now she's acting just fine, thank you very much. I copied all of the music from the laptop to the now-functioning desktop. I opened all the windows and wiped pollen off the kitchen faucet and cleaned out the stinky refrigerator and got that weird stain out of the carpet and washed the dog blanket. And you know what? I was happy.
There were many things I did not do. I didn't finish the lawn, because my back couldn't take doing it all at once. I didn't start typing out my copyediting notes so I could try, again, to bring copyediting back into my life. I didn't finish the baby blessing for J&N&K. I didn't do all the laundry or cook things to tide us over through the week. I didn't read or watch Buffy or hang out in front of movies. I didn't scrub the kitchen floor. And with the exception of the copyediting notes, I was fine with all of that. The copyediting notes, they are significant.
By last night I was seriously into a case of Sunday Evening. You know what I mean--that very specific kind of blues you get when Sunday evening rolls around and you have to face the fact that your lovely open weekend is over, and it's five whole days before you get another one and it's just too sad to contemplate. This morning when I got up the prospect of going to work made me want to cry, made me want to curl up on the floor and just start sobbing.
The other night L asked a few of us to hang out with her and help her decide between two graduate programs, one here in the city and one overseas. In the course of the discussion we reflected back to her that, based on her body language, she didn't really want to do either of them. We asked her, again and again, what makes her happy. She didn't come up with a firm answer, but she came up with some plausible directions, and she's turned down both programs.
I started telling this story because it reflects the place I'm in right now: a dogged and yet joyful focus on happiness as a guiding star, a belief that we can have lives that are, at their base, happy.* But as I'm writing this I'm noticing that the discussion with L made me really happy--asking the questions and helping her ferret out the answers. I was energized and excited and vehement and gesticulating. I liked the process of figuring out what the next right question was, listening to her answers and reflecting information back to her and figuring out the next right question. It was a particular kind of problem-solving combined with people-figuring-out that I thrive on.
When I last talked about job stuff with my therapist, I talked a lot about spiritual direction, but I'm wondering now if I need to also be investigating life coaching as a possible career trajectory for me. Both of them combine the one-on-one work I love with the things I find most fascinating: the inner workings of people's hearts and spirits. I see some homework in my future.
I was supposed to go out with my colleagues tonight to thank the volunteers who helped us with the event. Given that the only people who are coming are the people we all hang out with anyway, I may plead the very real headache I have and head home with my honey to think about this some more.
*L's husband S and I had a funny exchange about this. When I first expressed it over malaysian food, he disagreed and started talking about how life is suffering, at its base. I disagreed in turn. "Damn Buddhists," I muttered. "Damn Pagans," says he. I don't think the basic philosophies are divergent; Buddhism (as I understand it--Dale, feel free to correct me!--says suffering arises because of a false belief in permanence, and Wicca is all about riding changing cycles. The technologies they present to deal with those changing cycles are different, of course.