It’s dark right now. We’ll set the clocks back an hour this weekend (I just got sidetracked reading about daylight savings and standard time – fun fact: most of Arizona doesn’t observe it…). As the days have been getting shorter, there have been fewer hours of sunlight. Here in State College, sunlight is a term best used loosely. It might be light out, and that light might be caused by the sun, but you’d be hard pressed to use the word sunny. I don’t think there’s been more than 10 or 15 minutes of sunlight in any given day for the past four or five days. This is pretty much how I remember it – beautiful fall days (with some sun) followed by a long gray winter.
I have a friend, John, who lives out in L.A. We’ve known each other since the third grade. We were college roommates for three years here at Penn State. I suspect he moved out to California (a few years after college) partly in reaction to his time at Penn State. He hated the gray, damp, cold that seems to start in late October and run all the way through April or early May. I don’t blame him – I moved south, briefly, to get away from the harsh northeast winters. As I’m writing this I looked at my weather app. It’s 38 degrees but feels like 32 and raining. This is when I appreciate my coffee the most.
The weather, change of seasons, new job, and pandemic make settling in a challenge. Back in Bucks County, I had a treadmill. In Memphis, my apartment complex had a small gym – and of course, I had the option of long walks along the river. Here, short of buying a treadmill or joining a gym, I’m pretty dependent on being able to get outside to exercise. I’ve done little of that since getting here…. kinda like writing.
I suspect it will be a while before I find a groove on those things – exercise and writing. Most of my time seems to be divided between mundane have-to-do stuff (moving stuff around the house, unpacking, and taking care of things like getting the car registered) and work. It’s not unusual for me to be doing donor research, looking at a spreadsheet, or drafting emails at 6:30 in the morning and to be thinking about how to prioritize organizational objectives late at night. In fact, the other morning (and this morning) when I didn’t work and instead took time to write, I felt a little guilty. I’m a huge proponent of work/life balance and, if anything, favor tipping the scales more towards life. But, I think when work is fulfilling and taps into one’s natural curiosity and creativity it feels a lot less like work and more like learning and following your interests. I’ve usually been pretty lucky in having work that fueled my curiosity.
This difference between drudgery and curiosity seems to be a pretty important distinction. It’s something I hope to keep front of mind as a manager/leader. If someone is going to struggle with work/life balance, it seems best, and healthiest, if that struggle is self-imposed as opposed to being driven by the demands of the job or other obligations. My “guilt” over not writing or not working or not exercising at 6:30 in the morning is because I have competing priorities and interests. Nobody, other than myself, is breathing down my neck to write or to work or to exercise. It’s only when someone “forces” me to make sacrifices that I might not otherwise willingly choose to make on my own that resentment builds. Resentment is a slow-working poison to which the only antidote seems to be self-awareness.
I think about that emotion / sentiment (resentment) a lot. It seems to be the downfall of many personal and professional relationships. I suspect there was a lot of resentment in my last relationship – both towards the job and towards me and maybe towards a number of other things. She worked in an environment that was “always on” and often made last-minute demands on her time. And… she was in a new, whirlwind relationship that made even greater demands on her time – it too was “always on.” She quit both – first the job and then the relationship. Prior to that, I was in a brief relationship where, increasingly, I wanted to do things other than spend time together. I began to resent losing my time to the relationship. In my personal experience and observations of other people, that type of unhappiness doesn’t happen overnight. It usually builds to a point where quitting or walking away feels like the only option.
That said, it’s always my hope, for myself and for others, that a level of reflection can either short-circuit the flight response or confirm that it’s the appropriate course of action. It’s my hope that by pulling back a bit, one can recognize resentment before it sets in. Time for reflection – something that might be in short supply for a lot of people – can do wonders for perspective. With perspective, the demands of a job can suddenly seem trivial (when I worked at the Blues Hall of Fame and tensions in the office and museum seemed high, I once joked that there was no such thing as a blues emergency). With perspective, the pressures of a relationship might be seen as self-imposed or compounded by other pressures. With perspective, a string of sunless days is still a temporary string of sunless days.
And that’s where I am this morning – writing and thinking about a whole bunch of things that masquerade as something other than the desire for control, freedom, and choice. Struggling to balance competing priorities among things I enjoy (writing, reading, exercise, and work) and bitching about the weather because it’s the one thing over which I have no control. Today’s headline could have just as read: Old Man Shakes Fist at Clouds…