A well-earned respite

As of 60 minutes ago, I'm completely through the fall academic term. Sometimes it takes me until after Christmas to read all the papers, score all the exams, tally the points, and deal with "oddball" cases. But this year I was bound and determined to be finished, period, by December 19. It's a well-earned respite; I don't have to be anywhere for two-and-one-half weeks.

As I have said somewhere in a previous post (I'm not in the mood to find it!), life in general is full of demands, burdens, tasks, and challenges. Western Civilization certainly takes a good chunk of the blame; we are a culture that is built around being "productive," accomplishing tasks, filling out forms, meeting deadlines, yada yada yada. In some ways, it's a wonder that any of us keeps our sanity in the midst of it all. I'd like to say that the Christmas/New Year's season has been historically "restful," but more often than not, I've seen it as yet another series of tasks and responsibilities--enough so that I'm usually just relieved that it's the New Year and life will sort of go back to normal.

But now, today, I have 17 straight days where I really don't have to do ANYTHING, at least for work. Part of the academic life, it seems to me, involves a trade-off that I haven't always been able to take advantage of: namely, to have a modest, secure income in exchange for the ability to step back a bit, smell the roses, and even THINK about roses. It is such a liberating feeling that I hardly know what to do with myself at the moment. But damn, I think I don't mind trying to figure that out. Two weeks of freedom: it's hard to find in this world.