20190820.0430

With the weekend trip ended and Ms. 8 installed in school--comfortably and easily, I might add, which says something, even if I am not sure what--things are beginning to return to some semblance of normalcy, if only for a short time. It will be brief, in the event, as I am soon to take up a new professional position, one with significantly increased responsibility (and pay, which is good). Another set of adjustments is coming soon, though there should not be terribly many after, and I will appreciate having time to settle into my new roles before other things start to shift under me again.
How much of what I am doing now is possible only because the demands of my current position are as they are and not as they will be with the new job is unclear to me. I feel I struggle to get done what I feel the need to get done already; adding more seems like it would force me to abandon one thing or another, and I do not want to do that. I also feel that I do not do nearly as much as I ought to get done, though that is as much a product of my still having an academic's mindset as anything else. I internalized the ultimately unsustainable, unrealistic standards of production academe demands while I was making a go of becoming a professor, and I have not been able to let them go as swiftly as I took them up.
There are a number of things that that applies to, that I have not been able to let them go so swiftly as I took them up. I have been working on some of them; I know that keeping hold of them does not help me, that I am one of a few to keep them--if I am not the only one who does so. I have clung to things, and in clinging, I have not been able to let go and open myself to enjoyment that I might otherwise have had. That I recognize this does not make letting go easier, of course; seeing that a thing can be done is far different from doing that thing, however needful or helpful that thing might be. And I suppose I am in some ways afraid to let go; I have held long, the feel of the thing in my hand is, for all it hinders me, a touch-point, a certainty in an uncertain world.
I am amazed that, even now, my grip on it seems not to falter. Perhaps my muscles have locked in place; it is a thing that has been known to happen. Whether I can pry my hand open to let go, to let myself loose into the changing world I face, I do not know. I do not know.