Recovery Mode

I apologize for taking the week off from this space, but I’ve been having trouble getting out of a busy, hectic, draining funk, and I just needed to focus on doing that. I feel better, but I’m still awfully tired. I feel like I could sleep for days.

I’m trying not to get annoyed at the fact that I’m in this place; it just gives the negativity power, but I’ve missed the time to go to the gym or ride my bike or chill with people I love -- or do anything except grade papers, wring my hands over school stuff and try to stay ahead of the laundry and the dishes. To be fair, it isn’t a matter of physical time so much as the ability to find a mental and spiritual harmony in all that’s going on. I don’t multitask well and when there are too many balls in the air, like has been the case during the last week, it becomes a challenge to keep everything feeling like it’s working together. Sometimes, I can go into Emergency Mode for a short while to keep things from crashing to earth. Sometimes it happens that it all comes crashing down anyway, and Recovery Mode kicks in. That was last week.

I feel a little better about it all but I’m still in Emergency Mode, at least as far as school goes. Even though I have a week to go before April Break, I’ve got a lot of teacher work to do before then. Parent conferences are Wednesday and, while I actually look forward to talking with parents about their kids, there is much prep work to do beforehand if I’m to talk objectively about their performance, as well as compassionately about how to support them through the rest of the year. I have a unit on translation software for my Spanish II class that I realized late last week needs to be rebuilt and my first-year students have just handed me the outlines for their research papers -- all of which need to be reviewed by Wednesday so they can get their papers written by the time they get back from vacation.

I truly do not mind this work. It is part of a job I love deep in my heart (and yes, Mia, I really do love this stuff). When it competes with other parts of my world -- training, play time with my family, big picture thinking, the Community School -- the effort required to keep a harmony in all these endeavors can just prove too much even for Emergency Mode.

And so we will continue with Recovery Mode for a while. The good news is that eventually everything that was being juggled before will fall to the ground and I can start again.