The end of last week was a bit of a struggle\u2014the accumulated weeks of struggle combined with watching SJ and John Crowley defend (in the same day) drove the point of my stasis home with a vengeance. It was a bit of a low.<\/p>\n
It was doubly pleasant and important, then, that the weekend was a real raiser of spirits. On Saturday Kati and I got away for the day, spent a very relaxing morning talking at Darwin’s, and then a restorative afternoon walking through Maudslay State Park in Newburyport. It gave us the chance to finally spend the sort of quality, pair-bonding, unstructured and carefree time together that I had hoped Copenhagen would provide, but was disappointed that it hadn’t. Perhaps it just needed time, but things feel markedly improved this morning.<\/p>\n
On Sunday afternoon we spent some time with Evan and Katie (and Gavi), which was also a surprising source of motivation. Evan has an almost uncannily positive attitude to big tasks and intimidating projects at work. Perhaps it was because I came primed from a weekend of relaxing and connecting, but somehow giving my usual “no, I’m not done yet” pity party spiel this time inspired me to take a more Evan-ish, optimistic, go-gettum view of the task at hand. I am at a point where I can finish up (these first two chapters, at the very least), and what a formidable challenge. So, instead of moping, fearing, and pushing my head far into the sand until the last moment of the weekend, I actually spent Sunday evening quietly looking forward to getting to work and moving forward. I programmed the coffee maker before bed and felt rested and ready to go this morning.<\/p>\n
Anyway, this is all a long preamble, but the bottom line is that I am working at Darwin’s today feeling qualitatively different than I have for the past few months\u2014since the big push started petering out in March.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The end of last week was a bit of a struggle\u2014the accumulated weeks of struggle combined with watching SJ and John Crowley defend (in the same day) drove the point of my stasis home with a vengeance. It was a bit of a low. It was doubly pleasant and important, then, that the weekend was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1231,14607,13584],"tags":[16233,6277],"class_list":["post-2442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","category-research-journal","category-timekeeping","tag-morphospace","tag-motivation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2442"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2444,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2442\/revisions\/2444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/kotrc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}