Finding the joy

This is probably going to be more stream-of-consciousness than normal, so be prepared.

It just seems there's a drumbeat of bad stuff going on in the world. Oh, I know, it probably always has been so, but there seems to be a convergence of things that makes the paranoid part of me wonder if (a) I will still have a career a few years from now or (b) if I will still WANT a career in higher ed a few years from now or (c) if everything will just wind up going to blazes and if I want to live, I will have to run off to the forest and hide out there and live in a tent (in which case, death might almost be preferable, if it was a situation unlikely to resolve favorably). And yeah, in real TEOTWAWKI situations, you need a posse around you to help keep you alive, and I don't have a posse and I honestly don't know if any of the groups I am more or less loosely affiliated with would let me in or if I'd be the spare giraffe left behind when the Ark takes off. (From a story I once read, about a teenager who was excluded; he described himself as being like the third giraffe to show up at the ark, and of course, he would get turned away).

I don't know. It's getting harder to find the joy for more than a few minutes. The image I have is less going into work swinging my briefcase and whistling and more going in with my teeth gritted and a sense of grim determination to survive whatever life chooses to throw at me today.

It's like....I was thinking this morning about what little I know about horse tack. I remember from reading Black Beauty at an impressionable age that there was something called a "check rein" that was often used to force a horse to keep its head up - so it would look "proud" and therefore, I guess, give glory to its rider or the person it was pulling in a carriage. The implication was, check reins were painful and cruel. (And in some cases, they probably were. Of course, nothing is ever as simple or black and white as it seems. Wikipedia tells me that in some cases a mild sort of check rein is necessary to protect the horse's safety, as when drawing some carts and things, so it won't put its head down and get tangled in the shafts and hurt itself)

And of course, other horse owners would keep the horse on a soft bridle, maybe not even with a bit (at least, when the horse was not working) and the horse was freer and more comfortable.

And I admit, I feel a lot of the time like I am wearing a check rein, and am grinding down my teeth from grabbing grimly on to the bit (One way archaeologists can tell if the remains of a horse was from a working animal, at least from some cultures: is there tooth wear indicative of the animal being bitted?)

I don't know. I don't know if it's that I'm trying to do too much - between teaching and research and the various volunteer things I do (teaching Sunday school, serving as head elder, serving on a few committees, being secretary for AAUW) and trying to keep up with exercise and piano practice and cooking to eat healthfully - a lot of days it does feel like I'm on a treadmill, and all I'm really doing is running forward to the time when I can get into bed that night and stop pushing, stop striving.

The thing is, there's really nothing I can easily or graciously give up. The exercise is non-negotiable even though it means getting up at a stupid early hour (and therefore, having to go to bed at a stupid early hour). There are few enough people at church that I can't give up either task, even though I admit being head elder causes me a lot of stress (we have a couple elders who are not always the best at showing up when they are on duty, and I often wind up either filling in or asking someone else - and I always feel like a heel having to ask someone else who wasn't expecting to have to do it). So I don't know. I'm probably online too much, and maybe need to cut that back - but then again, that's my main "neutral" human interaction where I'm not having to do stuff for people or having to tell people to do stuff. (I hate having to tell people to do stuff.) The reason I would NEVER run for elected office is that having any kind of power is awfully stressful, and it's so hard to discern what is the "best" for the greatest number of people.

I'm just tired, and like I said, "grim determination" often beats out "joy" in how I get things done during the day. Or is that just what adulthood IS? Does being a responsible adult mean you are tired much of the time and you weigh time out in coffee spoons and find that when you are "done" (or at least can declare a halt) to the required work, you're often lacking energy to do what you want to do?

Part if this is just wondering every week at work what new duty is going to crop up - we are having to do multiple online "training" things about different stuff - everything from avoiding needle sticks* to what to do if one of your students comes to you and says their partner is abusing them (We're "required reporters," apparently, as it turns out). And we had to re-catalog all the chemicals we have, and are being warned we may have to change how we store some things even though we don't currently have proper storage and there's no money to buy proper storage....

(*Yes, everyone had to do this. It would make sense for people in biology and possibly chemistry but apparently EVERY campus employee had to do it).

I don't know. I feel like I've reached "peak effort" and adding on anything more to do is going to make me collapse into a puddle of nothingness. And I don't even have it as hard as some people - I guess I'm just a big marshmallow, because I see people raising kids alone and caring for aging parents on top of everything else, and they seem to manage better than I do. I don't know if I fail at adulthood, or if they are better at hiding their anguish than I am....

It could partly be the time of the semester, or the fact that I have two meetings this evening (and so, cannot rest for at least 12 hours now), or just bad stuff happening around me, or still dealing with the disappointment of losing the quilt shop in town, or, or, or. I don't know.

You know it's bad when you hear about a blizzard hitting Kansas and you think, "I wish that would come down here so school would be cancelled for one day and I could do what I wanted for that day"