Priorities and Phases

My daughter Alison told me that her friend Lianne shared this saying: "We will always have time for the things we put first."

 Life is full of different phases; it's just like having children. Once you figure out how to deal with the one you're in right now, it ends, and you have to figure out the next one. Most of my life it seems like I have had to work until sometime past the middle of the night to get my work done--dissertation, class preparation, etc. After a few decades of that, I noticed that my sleep habits were terrible. And I was tired. Also worried about the brain cells that insufficient sleep is supposed to suck up; I figure I don't have any brain cells to spare.

 But I finally figured out how to deal with this phase: do my own work first. Not class prep, not grading, not dishes, email, grocery shopping, bathroom cleaning, laundry. Not personal grooming, breakfast, writing bills, checking my bank balance, or straightening my desk so that I can work. This is what I do: Leave my lap top on at night. Wake up in the morning, pray, make a cup of ginger tea, sit on my office couch with my laptop on my lap and write. I write until I'm too hungry to sit there any longer, my battery dies, or it is time to go teach. Then I start the rest of the day--breakfast and onward.

The result: I think about my book every day, pages are being completed, and I have plenty of time for everything else. It's just like that object lesson with the mayonaise jar and the big rocks, small pebbles, sand, and liquid (officially beer, but in my world, perhaps ginger tea). If you put the biggest things in first, everything else fits. I feel so happy about this. And I realize that what I've been planning all along is working out: all the conference papers I have been giving are sliding right into my book, just as I had imagined--not in so many words, but the research is done, and I'll be writing for many weeks before I run out of things that I know for sure. Yay me!

P.S. I'm getting enough sleep for the first time in 38 years.