Coming Home (Third Essay): Returning to Work

The "coming home" process, as I have been describing it, consists of three parts: (1) "sorting out" the memories of your trip; (2) performing the mundane tasks of re-entry; and (3) resuming your work. We often think that we ought to be able, upon return, just to plunge right back into (3). After all, a week away means we are behind at the office or in our work. Think of the emails that have accumulated. Ok, don't think about them. One of the "bragging points" I increasingly hear as I talk to people at conferences is how many emails they will have on return. I guess I am supposed to assume that the more emails you have, the more important you are or the harder you work, but my goal is to have zero emails when I return. I can do that because very few people really want to talk to me in life and because I often deftly answer right away, if I can.

Well, the task of re-entry and getting work going again can be daunting, and I realized for years that one of the reason I was often angry or impatient on my "return to work" day was that I wanted just to resume without taking the steps needed to allow for a good resumption. In this essay I will list all the tasks I either need or want to perform right away, and how I have learned to order them calmly so that now, just 33 hours after return from a six-day trip, I feel I am almost completely back in my flow. First, I made a list of "desired essays" or "necessary tasks" I had to do. Let me give you that list so you can see the kinds of things I worry about (and you will instinctively understand why no one calls me! In fact, when someone asked me once why I got into teaching history, I said that it was because no one breathlessly calls in the middle of the night asking details about battles in the 30 Years' War). I thought I needed to do the following "work" things:

1. Write one essay, perhaps, on my "trip". This is my third on that subject, and you can see how the idea has "morphed."
2. Finish an essay on words that friend Randy Hilfman sent me from the Nov. 3 Seattle Spelling Bee. First essay is here.
3. Finish my third autobiographical essay on what I do well; the first two are here.
4. Catch up on reading Autism stuff. I am on a list serve for autism issues, and I have more than 600 emails to read about that--some can take seconds to read; others take ten minutes, because they enclose an article or other difficult information.
5. Meet with people about the new committee I chair in Oregon concerning the abolition of the death penalty. I have been voted into that role (indeed, I wanted to relate some of that in an essay).
6. Return to my writing on words--perhaps two essays a day.
7. Continue my daily Latin reading. I am working through Cicero's Orations on the Cataline conspiracy. I just got a 19th century book through interlibrary loan that is a "completely parsed Cicero"--on the First Oration, and so I want to go through that oration, memorizing as I go and learning everything about Latin grammar and Roman history I can.
8. Continue my "50 pages a day" reading in leading 20th century English novels. Now I am re-reading James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist. I often write an essay or two after reading my 50 pages, because often the author does something that triggers memories or is instructional for me.
9. Continue on my French lessons. I hired a tutor because French is the only major European language I don't speak, and I feel terribly embarrassed about that. The structure of the language is crystal clear to me, but I need help on pronunciation, etc. So, back to that.
10. Miscellaneous essays--about Simon Greenleaf (a former Harvard Law Professor whose life interests me) or movies or other reading I do.
11. Continue any work with the Kansas foundation that is "left over" from my visit.
12. Begin to try to "market myself" to various people in areas I might contribute to their work. Right now that is taking the form of consulting with people about their writing projects, but it may morph into other areas.
13. Write my essays summarizing Supreme Court cases to be heard in December. I am "current" through the November cases.

Of course, all this making of a list made me begin to think about my next vacation, but I only let that thought have about two minutes before I returned to the next task.

Dealing with the List

So, while I was sitting in my chair for an hour (I describe this in the first essay), I created this list of things I wanted or needed to do to get back into the "flow" of my professional life. I also realized that Thanksgiving is coming, kids are coming home, and I want to see them and spend time with them. Rather than beginning to "panic" as the ideas began mounting in my brain while sitting in the calm of my chair, I let all the ideas come forward. I let them tussle with each other for a moment, as if one was saying to another, "I need to go first in Bill's mind!," before giving them all a space on "the list." I didn't know where to begin, frankly, and so I just let the ideas "play" with each other in my mind while sitting on the chair. Soon, it began to emerge that I needed to talk about the things in these three essays first. These essays, then, are my "clearing the deck" essays so that I can really get to work. They might be analogized to fully cleaning a space, throwing out the garbage lying on the floor, making decisions on that old stuff on the shelves, etc., before hosting the party.

But now the decks have been "cleared." So, I will eat lunch with a friend, go to the gym (oh, yes, I didn't mention that one week away on a trip takes me away from the gym, too--and I get back to that), and then have death penalty meetings the rest of the day in Portland. It isn't as grim as it sounds. In the mean time I have put together emails to continue my Kansas conversations. I will find time for Cicero today, perhaps not until tonight, and possibly one other subject. These essays are enough writing for one day, and so I then have freedom to start thinking ahead for the next set of essays.

Life is returning to me, and I have been happy every moment of the return. It is only 33 hours since I burst into my home at about 1:00 a.m. yesterday, exhausted and hungry from my trip. All of this has "come together" in 33 hours. As I think of it, very little of it was "luck." It all happened, really, in that one hour in the chair...

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