Considerations on work/life balance: Sometimes, a moment can knock you so far off your axis that it presents an opportunity to reimagine your life. How many of us are considering burnout right now? What worth do those far-off successes really hold in the grand scheme of things?
Sometimes, I spread my work on my floor like jeopardy tiles, and as for my shortcomings, they are nullified, maintaining my words, kneeling over them, marking x for rework, y for language, z for title.
When this morning came, I sank beneath my blankets and did some simple math totalling the week before: +80 hours work, +5 nature walks, +4 missed deadlines, +9 cups of coffee, +1 small epiphany—I am never sure, I realized, how much space it takes to live—the new week's todo list unfolding in front of me. I don’t want this life. I have my sights on something different. Something that ignites instead of burns.
Memory leaks through, a heavy sieve—it knows the moments when I couldn’t afford a meal, knows how easily ones worth is quantified by output. I let my fingers walk the letters of my words, examine their own pressure, re-learning language, infantile as ever.
I can see outside of it right now (thank you, Jenny Odell), and it’s often through rectangles of sunlight on water, often scraps of paper picked up by wind caught in the roof corners, often the sound of someone laughing pitched upward, or tires turning out the gravel reminding of the road ahead, all the sounds of forward if forward made a noise. I invite you to reexamine the limitless possibilities in front of you. Life’s a flicker in the side-view mirror.
No comments:
Post a Comment