In some ways, I was looking forward to the enforced break that this recent and largely unwelcome move would provide. I imagined all the space I would have without a regular job, out of school for a few months, books and writing projects and knitting stacking up to be tackled in this space between things. I imagined long dog walks, setting up shop at one of the local coffee shops to sift out a few chapters from the cobwebs in my head. I imagined bike rides and paddling forays and adding to my growing stack of goodreads reviews.
There was some momentum at the beginning. I tore through half the books Pete had gifted me for my birthday, paddled around the lake, peddled around town, knitted a few things for the impending babies of friends. I got started on a writing project that’s been knocking around in my head for a year or two. But the momentum was slight, like the third in a row of pool balls, energy dissipating fast with each subsequent crack. We’ve been here two months, and instead of gaining momentum, I am becoming intimately familiar with the crushing weight of ennui.
On the kayaking trip I took a few weekends ago, I tried to pay close attention to the instructor’s paddling style. I realized right away that the breakneck pace (that felt reasonable to me) I’ve been trying to make around our little lake out here is in direct opposition to the slow, intentional stroke pattern she fell into automatically as we started our five hour day on the lake. She’s done a lot more paddling, and more recently, taking her own lessons in pace from long open water crossings and the better part of days in her boat, she is content to glide across the lake in a cadence and measure that I never would have accepted as reasonable. But in the end, with hours and miles to cover, it was the only reasonable pace to take.
Back home, I find myself wavering between utter stasis and a trickle of tasks done, generally only the most pressing. Feeding the dogs, emptying the sink, very occasional laundry. There has been no writing for weeks, and most days I find myself laying couch-bound, watching the clock, waiting for it to get late enough to go to bed again. I am not good at this, this keeping up of momentum. But how much momentum do I need? I wonder if I set my expectations of productivity too high at the start of the summer, and now that I’m not reaching my goals I’m unconsciously throwing in the towel. I feel spoiled with all this free time, and crushed with guilt for squandering it in a deep funk. What is a reasonable pace, after all?
entelechyproject 