Lost in the calendar

This calendar from 1883 may be mechanical, but my approach to my own days doesn’t have to be. (Library Company of Philadelphia)

This is the first “first day of school” that I haven’t been a part of in quite some time.

Most of my life has been on an academic cycle, whether as a teacher or as a student. And right now, I am technically neither. My team is running the first day at The Little Middle School without me, in person, while I’m more than a thousand miles away. It makes me feel a bit wistful, and also like I’m forgetting something.

I’m slowly adjusting to the idea that I get to choose my own routine instead of following the academic calendar to pace myself and my work. It’s a bit of a shift. Strictly speaking, I don’t even have to work a normal workday, but I tend to do that anyway and feel weird when I don’t: 7:00 A.M. to 4:00 or 5:00 P.M., not unlike a teacher’s schedule.

Unlike a teacher, I’ve been holding to these same hours throughout the summer, although I live in Vacationland and sometimes it’s appropriate to behave accordingly. What’s more, school doesn’t start here for another month, so everyone around me is deeply in summer mode. It’s a bit disorienting. Where, in the calendar, am I?

Like a lot of people, I’ve labored through the pandemic without taking much of a break. Even when I’ve traveled, I’ve continued to work. Without the enforced vacations of the academic calendar, I’ve drifted through the months without a clear plan for my own rest and regeneration. I’ve worked half days here and there and taken the weekends off, but haven’t dropped the sense of urgency that has resulted from my maddeningly bovine cognitive processes over the course of the pandemic. I had figured that if I was taking twice as long to do the work, I needed to work twice the time. No space for a true holiday, in the Commonwealth sense of the word.

This didn’t work so well because I just kept slowing down. I am tempted to compare myself to an overloaded machine in a busy factory, but the whole point is that I’m not a machine, and I was treating myself like one. By the time I realized the flaw of my approach, I believed that it was too late. But that thinking was flawed, too, because the end of the pandemic is as a mirage on the horizon. I am not waiting until then.

So I decided to pick a week in the near future, far enough away to plan for but close enough to anticipate. I will take this week completely off—no work projects, no email, no meetings, no nothin’. Hobbies only. Scandalously, this week is taking place during school! But that doesn’t matter, and it’s good for me to practice thinking that way.

It feels weird to take time off without traveling. It feels weird to take time off, period, without a school break or a holiday (in the American sense of the word). But I know that this time off is an investment in myself, as necessary as stopping to put gas in a car. I’m committed to it.

At a certain point, I wonder: Why just a week? I may well get to the end of the week and decide to take another, following through on my commitments to others while continuing to eschew any work I can put off. I’d like to wait until I feel eager and industrious, clear of mind and relaxed of spirit. It would be an interesting experiment to hold off on work until I truly feel restored. How do I know how long that will take?

I don’t know, just like we don’t know how many days or weeks a person needs to truly master the concept of division, learn how to write an essay, or connect socially with peers. But we send them all to the same school for the same length of time, usually seven hours a day, 180 days a year for thirteen years, apparently our best guess for the amount of time that should be spent pursuing these things. We dutifully participate in this arrangement for so long that even when we’re free of it, we might rely on these rhythms to organize our lives. We might also pick up the rhythm of the forty-hour workweek, 9:00 to 5:00 every weekday for 50 weeks a year, 48 if we’re lucky. But we don’t have to. I don’t have to. And I forget that sometimes.

I may be lost in the calendar right now, but I can intentionally create a new one to follow. I can take into account not only my desired time off, but also the work I might like to do that I haven’t yet made time for.

It’s strange to not be at school today. I’m playing hooky by…working. I’ve got a full day with no time for my old job. It’s a little sad and I miss my students, but I’m also excited for what’s next. As to what that is, I will figure it out after I am back from my vacation.