One day I will have reached a stopping place before time off. My sentences finished, my documents closed, my away messages up.

Instead, I usually feel like a kitten in a yarn tangle. I keep pouncing on ideas or projects, thinking to wrestle them to an end, and instead find that I am further ensnared with no end in sight.  

In August 2020, Sam and I realized the daily house rhythms were not facilitating my spouse’s self-care, and therefore were a problem for all especially with everyone working from home. So we experimented with dinner meal planning (to reduce daily decision fatigue - we’ve continued this one), blocking off time in the calendar to plan meals and camping (yeah this didn’t happen) together, and implementing family journaling after dinner and before bath time (this was fun for the 4 days it lasted), and family meditation before bed (ditto).

In our house we’re starting a new practice to ask one another “I heard a big sigh. What are you feeling? Are you ok?”.

You’d think this was to help Theo learn to identify and name emotions but it’s mostly to improve communication and awareness in us adults.

Every day we are making choices that reflect our values (and perhaps our anxieties). Exercise could have been paper writing. First-author paper writing could have been working on administrative things or other people’s projects.

These are lessons I keep re-learning about how I function through dramatic change, adapted from my week 2 pandemic letter:

Prioritize ways to stay healthy.

As often occurs, during today’s ride I thought of an extended metaphor. I pass, or get passed by, many cyclists each ride. Today, someone that looked like they ought to be really fast on the downhills was going quite slow, and I was frustrated and wondering what was going on. I thought about how many people we travel beside in our professional life…. It’s rare that we know much of the scope of what is going on with the people around us. But we often judge ourselves against our perception of how fast “those” people seem to be going (or went when they were at our stage), how fast they look like they should be able to go.

Life priorities in times of upheaval, according to me