Summer Break--A Paragraph a Day

When I was younger, it was easy to imagine that my teachers had a nice vacation every summer.  After all, it's a long time off, isn't it?  It's more than eight weeks straight, and most people are lucky to get a couple of weeks in a row.  Now that I'm a teacher, though, I understand just how necessary those breaks are, both for teachers and for students.  Learning takes a lot of work, and people--especially young people--get extremely burned out after eight or nine months of classes.  Right now, for example, we have a few weeks left of class and my students are having a hard time sticking with it.  My colleagues are all walking around exhausted, even though the year isn't quite over yet.  It makes it very clear to me just how important rest is in our lives--without it, we can pretty much never work to our full potential, and achieve the things that we need to achieve.  Rest is part of an important part of the balance between achieving and reinvigorating ourselves, and we need to make it part of who we are.  I have summer break coming up, and the most important part of it for me is using it to rejuvenate, to help myself to be a more effective teacher whenever I'm in the classroom.  I know what it's like to burn out, which is going to happen when we don't make sure that we rest, and I do everything I can to keep burnout at bay.  If we don't rest, we become less effective and less happy with who we are, so it's important that we be sure that we do rest when we have the chance to do so.

Work to Be Done--A Paragraph a Day

In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things
are needed: they must be fit for it; they must not do too much of it;
and they must have a sense of success in it--not a doubtful sense,
such as needs some testimony of other people for its confirmation,
but a sure sense, or rather knowledge, that so much work has been
done well, and fruitfully done, whatever the world may say or think about it.

John Ruskin


I like to work.  It helps to give me a nice feeling of achievement, of accomplishment.  Helps.  My sense of achievement usually doesn't come from the work itself, but the ways that I've put myself into the work to get it done, and hopefully to get it done well.  Sometimes I'm much more relaxed while I'm working than I am when I'm not doing anything.  I never want to get to the point at which I only want to be productive, but I don't mind liking the feeling when I have it.  It's very easy, I think, to allow work to overwhelm us, to take over our lives, basically, and I never want that to happen to me either.  I like work because I keep it in a balance--just enough work balanced with just enough rest balanced with just enough recreation.  It's a delicate balance to keep, of course, but one that's necessary.  After all, there's always work to be done, and we do it better when we come at it from a place of peace and balance rather than overwhelming ourselves with just another task to be done.  I like working, and I hope that I never stop working.  But I also hope that I never make work the center of my world, for that would be a very sad center when all is said and done.

Quiet Afternoons--A Paragraph a Day

It's really quite fascinating to me just how nice quiet afternoons at home have become for me.  There was a time when I wanted to be out doing something, when I wanted to be active, when I felt I was wasting my time if I wasn't actually doing something.  But these days, some of my most pleasant moments come when I choose to stay home in the afternoon and read or play chess or color or draw or write.  I still love being active and doing things, but I've reached a point at which balance is very important, too, and I really like being at home, doing nothing, while outside the world keeps going on and on without me playing an active role in it.  I wouldn't want to do it all the time, of course, as I'm sure the charm would wear thin, but as long as I do balance staying in on a quiet afternoon and just relaxing with the other approaches to life that I tend to take, then I'll be fine.  Such afternoons stir appreciation for the home I have to relax in, for the money I have to maintain the home and my lifestyle, for the opportunity even to just slow down and be for a few hours.  It's a privilege that not everyone in the world is able to enjoy.  Quiet afternoons can give us some of our best moments if we can be sure to actually enjoy and appreciate them without feeling that we should be doing something else.