This picture was taken out on the end of Harbor Island. It is a wide open space, a beach usually totally devoid of humans (but thriving with life), and it is one of the strangest and wildest and most jaw-dropping places I’ve ever experienced. We were out there one day and a couple was walking out there (rare to see anyone out there), so I asked them to take a picture for us. The bambinos and I have spent a lot of time out there over the past month. Interestingly enough, Braydon hasn’t even been out there yet. I’ve spent a ton of time alone with the kids this summer. Braydon’s been working a lot, and I have been taking a lot of time off.
Taking time off is hard for me. In the past 20 years the only time off I’ve taken has been sporadic vacations (never more than a week or 10 days), and my two family leaves (one semester when we adopted Kyle and Owen, and one semester when I gave birth to Meera). I have some deeply entrenched workaholic tendencies that I’m always trying to keep in check. And this summer has been a major challenge for me.
But now, as we approach our last week here, I am feeling better than ever. I look at this picture, above, and I see so clearly how important — and good — this summer has been for me, on so many levels.
I know that I will go back to work in a few weeks. I know that I will work hard, and it will be grueling, for the entire academic year. We will be living on campus, with all that goes with that. But this summer is revitalizing me even more than I could have ever hoped for. I feel so alive and in-tune. I feel so connected to my kids, my husband, and the world around me. I feel so refreshed. I am, right now, wishing I had figured this out years ago. Right now, if I could give advice to rising academics, I’d say this: do whatever you have to do to get tenure — and then, if you’re not totally dead by the time you get tenure, work your butt off during the academic year but start taking big chunks of each summer off. This doesn’t mean that we are truly “off” (most academics never are; we think about our work and brainstorm our research and percolate our ideas 100% of the time). My guess is that my ‘official’ work will be stronger than ever this coming year because of taking this time this summer.
On the other hand, I’m worried that I’ll — as a good friend hypothesized to me this morning — perhaps get “sea sick” in the attempt to vacillate between the two worlds of summer and school year, wide open spaces and the fishbowl of living on campus, the south and the north, the time “off” and the time “on.” As he said to me: will it be too much of a “rapid oscillation between two extremes”? I don’t know. It is scary. And I’m anxious about it.
I’m not prone to seasickness. At least not the actual on-the-water type. We will have to wait and see what happens. For now, I will do my best to make the most of this last week on Harbor Island.
My friend also suggested that rather than getting seasick, maybe I’ll feel it more like bungee jumping or roller coaster riding (both of which I like!). We shall see.