Tempus Fugit! – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane
This week some words on time management.
In school we don’t just teach our subject matter, in my case history, and in some instances, geography and French, Latin, and Irish, we also teach valuable life skills. One of the skills which I am still learning how to do is the skill of balancing my time. It occurred to me several weeks ago that when I returned to Kansas City December 2022, I was looking forward to having a quiet domestic life here in my adopted home city, enjoying the arts of the city, enjoying the good food of the city, spending time with my family and my friends, going to mass on Sundays at my parish church on a regular basis, and living what to me seems like an ordinary life. In the process of trying to make that ordinary life work I’ve taken on many jobs.
This has resulted in my schedule filling up dramatically. I am fortunate to be able to work in fields that I excel in. And I know that I couldn’t do more things with my writing, with my teaching, with my service in the arts, I just need to find the way to balance all of my responsibilities, all of my passions, and all of my joys. Time management is a beautiful thing when you figure it out. I’m most of the way there; there’s still that I could be working on. I might have three or four, or maybe five things on my to-do list on a given day, but find myself finishing maybe two or three of those things because the days are short. It makes me wonder if I’m perhaps noticing for the first time in my life that I don’t want to work as much in the winter when we have such short daylight hours. When I was studying for my comprehensive exams, I used to work a good 12 hours a day often times going back to my desk after an evening of dinner and TV and resuming work until one or 2 o’clock in the morning. I realized that this was not good for me, and so have since endeavored to avoid that practice. Yet, this avoidance has resulted in me, working less overall, and getting less done. And in spite of that avoidance and ideally the extra quiet time to focus on other things, I find myself still not getting a full night sleep, because I can’t turn my mind off, and quiet my thoughts while I’m trying to rest.
This is what happened on Monday night of this week, when I found myself lying awake in bed until 4 o’clock in the morning thinking through my life since I returned home to Kansas City. I’ve done some pretty decent work today considering my sleep deprived state, yet I certainly could’ve done better. And it strikes me as fascinating how my ability to get things done can be limited by my fatigue, yet also enhanced by the adrenaline and drive to achieve my goals.
I don’t particularly want to be a self-help writer, I hope that most things which may appear in that genre could be discerned by the individual reader on their own. I am perhaps too stubborn and prideful to read in that genre, yet here I am writing something which could fit into it. Sleep is a good thing. Rest is a wonderful thing. Here in the United States, we have a tendency to work far too much and not give ourselves enough time to rest and relax. I often feel that I can’t relax when I still have things to get done, which is why I started to create to-do lists. Naturally, since I accepted a position which took up almost all of my time in the Fall, I dropped the habit of making to do list, which is perhaps a part of my frustrations today.
Recently, when I was building a lesson for one of my jobs about the history of home rule and Republicanism in Ireland, I reread Robert Emmett, famous 1803 speech from the dock, in which Emmett says That his epitaph will remain unwritten while Ireland remains unfree. There’s a sense of incompletion that I appreciate in this document because I feel that I will not really rest until the work that I am endeavoring to complete today is done. The goalposts are in sight for all these things which I am doing, so there’s chance for rest on the horizon as well. I am a very goals oriented person. Overall, I even have a stack of fun reading material which I have left there for myself to pick up and there are books which I will only begin. Once I finished other ones I’m currently reading. I worry, of course with my torturous speed of fun reading that I may very well not get to those fun books that are further down on the list until the point at which time I’m no longer interested in reading them.
So perhaps this speaks to that truism that we ourselves are often the cause of our worst foibles and faults, I think that’s fair in my case. Even now, as I dictate this weeks blog, I attempts to do more than one thing at once, to fill my time as best I can. This is a time that I would normally spend listening to podcasts and music, letting myself enjoy the sonic experience. Yet here at 6:30 in the evening on Tuesday, I find I don’t have a podcast written a blog post not paired for this week’s publication, something which I had really hoped I would have ready by now.
That might very well be a good sign of my life and times today. Even after, decisions and conclusions were reached which freed up my time and made me feel more fulfilled, I am still struggling and struggling evermore to do all of the things that I want to do in this time that I have. Tempus fugit!
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 