Siliceous and Delicious

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here, and it’s been a long time since I’ve really sat down and focused on work, hard. There’s been a series of distractions, that’s true: Peter’s wedding, Maria’s visit. But certainly over the past two weeks since Maria’s left, I haven’t had any excuses, yet I haven’t been able (or willing) to focus. That changed last night, when I finally sat down to crack on with the morphospace and felt a glimmer of the focus and dedication I’ve been missing begin to return.

Maybe I just needed some time to stew, some time to direct my focus and energy on other things. The image of the blank word document next to a furiously vacuuming and mopping graduate student is a cliché, but somehow the sentiment of “I’ll be able to focus much better once x is taken care of” seemed to ring particularly true in this instance: the list of non-work projects and niggling, undone round-the-house chores had grown to a length at which it left me feeling seriously disorganized and irritated. Now that I’ve rebuilt my bike and Kati’s Trek (both of which had sat unused since June), repaired Pierre’s bike (which had been taking up space on our porch since I offered to work on it in July), caught up on my PocketMoney budgeting (for the first time since July), opened a second bank account, hired the immigration lawyers on and begun collecting documents for them, reorganized the front hallway closet (so that finding a suitcase or a jacket is no longer a ten-minute mining odyssey), reorganized and cleaned up the front porch, dropped off two big bags of old stuff at Goodwill (which we’d been carting around in the car for the past three months), picked up my mother’s new glasses from the shop and mailed them to her, mailed a belated birthday card to Peter’s new wife, done umpteen loads of laundry, built a cable organizer for the desk in the living room (removing an eyesore of a tossed cable salad that had been bothering me for weeks), ordered a turkey for thanksgiving, and crossed a whole lot of other tasks off my list, I feel much more settled and ready to focus.

What has also lifted a weight off my shoulders was my last meeting with Andy. I presented him with a gory description of the most recent failures of  the FIB project and the diatom sonication project, and my desire to set them aside—and he agreed. And added that he always felt that of the six projects I had started, a couple wouldn’t work out, and so I was still on target. I also made the case that I wanted to focus on just one project for once, so as not to be constantly investing time into the mental overhead associated with switching from project to another, and he was very supportive of that decision, too. It feels good to be zeroing in on something specific to work on. Something to actually, eventually, complete.

Other than the desire to get cracking on the list of non-work things I wanted to get done, what is it that’s been keeping me from working? Because while that explains where the time has gone during the last week, it doesn’t explain why I haven’t made any discernible forward motion in the month before that. Part of the answer, I think, has to lie in my still-unresolved relationship to the PhD, the lingering feeling that I’m not doing as well as I could or should, the uncertainty over why I’m doing this if I don’t want to follow the track this puts me on.

Here’s where I feel I had something of a breakthrough recently, a breakthrough that I credit to having taken myself out of the routine grind of sitting in front of the computer at the office, trying to make myself work. I went out for a walk yesterday afternoon, in the prime of a warm and sunny late autumn day. I was feeling frustrated and unmotivated, deeply unwilling to work. Maybe it’s seeing Beau and Mark, at different stages of the same process, moving on to real and relevant jobs, finding their place as productive members of society, leaving me deeply worried about what that place will be for me. But at some point during my walk it occurred to me that this was not the best way to think about it, and that I’ve fallen back into a comfortable old routine of focusing on the future, on the next step. I spent much of time in high school telling myself how much better life will be if I can just get through it. And while I was at Imperial I convinced myself that life was miserable now, but I just needed to graduate, and then things would get better. I’m sure a small part of that is just that I’m tired of being a student, and it does feel better not to be a student (I learned that much during my year at Earlham and my time in the national service). But the bigger part of it is a matter of perspective and attitude.

Life is good. Right now. I have the freedom to take a walk in the middle of the day, to stroll through Belmont in the sun as the last few brightly colored leaves let go of the trees and join the rustling masses on the sidewalks. I can take a week off to hang out with my mother, at a moment’s notice, and another week to clean the house. And nobody minds. I get paid to do this, and I get paid enough to pay the rent for a beautiful apartment in a quiet neighborhood, with a garden and a fireplace, to buy a farm share, and shop at Whole Foods. And I have a boss who never tells me off, never tells me what to do, always praises my work and values what I do. The point is that I’ve arrived. I’ve made it. I’ve spent so long being ambitious, aiming high, accepting challenges, trying to excel and be the best at everything I do that the anxiety and nervousness that this level of performance requires has become second nature. To get to Harvard, you have to worry, constantly, about what comes next. But I’ve arrived now. I’m here. I’ve achieved as much as I really want or need to achieve, and I’ve even realized that I actively don’t want to continue down this road—so it’s OK to relax, and take it all in, and stop worrying about the future. I think the problem is that it’s such a routine now to try to bubble up to the top of the pack, to do the best at whatever task teacher assigns, or the world expects from you, that it’s easy to continue to think that way even when your own goals are completely at odds with those of the world around you. It’s made no easier by the fact that most of my peers are on the same track, are trying to make it to the top of the class, are trying to get those high-profile professorships at top-notch research universities, and do actually want that for themselves.

It’s really hard for me to remember that I am where I want to be, right now. And to enjoy that. Whatever comes next will come, but right now, I’m actually OK. In as much of an objective analysis as I can perform on myself, my struggles with the work really boil down to two simple things, I think—a lack of interaction with other people in my work, and a lack of measurable success and achievement in what I do. But the whole caboodle of self-destructive thoughts about how I’m not Woody Fischer or Jon Wilson or a young Andy Knoll is really a daft waste of energy, and a total waste of the privileged position I’m in right now.

Having finally made this—definitely obvious and probably entirely reiterated—breakthrough, I was finally able to move on, and finished going through the remaining taxa by dinner time. Success.