Emerging from the Deep

It’s a little difficult to pin down the train of thought that produced the decisions to agree to help with some special projects in the semester I am teaching both an overload and a new course for the first time. There isn’t much time to think about it, so perhaps that explains why no answers have emerged. Whatever.

The overload course is a partial-semester course, and though it’s a ton of work, I always enjoy it--and I always forget just how much time it takes to do it properly. If I’d known then what I know now, it’s not so clear that I would have agreed to design the new course I’m teaching, what with its interlocking with another course that had to be revised at the same time as the new one was designed. Even knowing how slammed I would be, I absolutely would have agreed to help with the conference this summer, but maybe bitten off a bit less of those tasks? That one’s hard to figure. For certain, I would not have scheduled getting sick in the midst of it all, or overshooting my energy so badly one weekend that I had a recurrence. Those are easy. Definite errors in judgement.

The bright side of everything is, well, the bright side: it’s spring. The magnolia outside the bedroom window is in beautiful bloom, the tree just beyond my desk is budding out so fast you can practically watch the process and the sun, glorious sun, has been shining almost every day. I haven’t worn a coat to campus in days. It’s glorious. Another silver lining is that I’ve been so busy I haven’t had much time or energy to worry much about the upcoming MRI, though it is creeping into my dreams the last few nights. It’s not the actual MRI, of course, that’s the issue, but the results. As they say, whatever the outcomes, we’ll know more next week.

Thank you again for the notes and inquiries and good wishes during recent days. I hope I’ve re-calibrated and reorganized so that things will be in better balance and I’ll get back to posting more regularly. If you live somewhere there’s spring, revel in it. If you don’t, let me just remind you gently that you probably don’t appreciate your weather enough because it’s there all the time. Spring, even after the relatively mild winter we had, is soul-feeding.