time to get back to work... (kinda)

So the past week (two, really) have been spent readjusting to going to be and waking up in the same place. As any 15-second snippet of Behind the Music will attest, life on the road can be profoundly disorienting. In fact, I think I lost track of precisely what day it was before we even left Boulder.

But this is beside the point.

The point is that all the relatives have been visited, the pantries have been restocked, and the unwanted, unneeded, and/or inherited contents of the storage shed have finally been dispersed to their respective thrift stores, landfills, and new homes. This sundry collection has existed in one form or another since the late 1990's and provided a convenient dumping ground for the items my father might need in the future, the childhood relics my brother had forgotten, and the collectibles whose actual value and sentimental values were sometimes confused in my own imagination.

But this is also beside the point.

The point is that much of the heavy lifting was done last summer, but there still remained a piano, a hot water heater, and a cigar store Indian that my grandfather (the one who died when I was 2) brought home much to the dismay of my grandmother (the one who died when I was 28). Along with these large items there were lawn mowers, plastic shelving, baseball cards, surveying stakes, and a ceramic bust of Chewbacca that my grandmother (the one still living) painted for me as a child:

i
m
age
miss
in
g

But this is even more beside the point.

The point is that I face a crisis of direction. So long as I was concerning myself with moving things from point A to point B, it was easy to maintain a sense of forward momentum, easy to feel that Things Were Getting Done.

How much of our lives are dependent on this illusion? How much of our sense of value is derived not from meaning, but from motion? How often do we close our eyes, wait for the thinking to subside, and then realize that meaning comes before motion?

But this, while not beside the point, is not what I meant to say.

What I meant to say, perhaps, is that for the past six month (or so) this venue has functioned as something of a ready-made. A pleasurable, engaging ready-made – but a ready-made nonetheless. Our honeymoon, and the neat geographic progression from one locale to the next, provided a structure, a form, a mold that could be deployed time and again without too much concern for how it should be shaped.

Now, though, I'm presented with innumerable reminders that it's time to get back to work. I have syllabi to design for classes in the fall, decisions to be made about which PhD programs to apply, and a half-started project that's been kicking around my head for more than two years. Of these things, it is the final one that weighs most heavily on my mind. My graduate studies provided a neat excuse (ready-made one might say) to keep the project on the back burner, and now I'm faced for the first time with nothing more than my own sloth and fear as impediments to the project.

This is exactly the point.