Constructing Now

 

After two days of decluttering, cleaning, dusting, reorganising, and rethinking my work space, I'm finally sitting down to write in it.

Inspired by a colleague who recently turned her office upside down in order to refresh her working environment, I realised that I hadn't done much more than dust around things and refresh my tea supply since the end of the covid pandemic. Time for a change. 

..."wash down the walls and scrub the floor / of your study before composing a syllable." 

--So says Billy Collins in his fantastic poem "Advice to Writers". It's advice I give all the time, er, or rather the reverse of these lines. What Collins is getting at: do what you must to get to the writing but cleaning or clearing or doing anything to perfection first is just procrastination tactics.

Procrastination is not a demon I need to deal with very often, unless I count my once yearly Netflix watching binge-until-my-eyes-hurt spree that I seem to go on about two weeks before the start of the new academic year. Denial? Maybe. My brain telling me that I haven't had enough down time over the summer yet? Definitely.

Either way, I've gotten to that week of the year where I'm trying to re-muster the energy to start thinking about deep lesson planning deadlines again; about event planning for my students and module reading lists etc. But...now that my work space is clean and smelling quite like fruit salad from the disinfectant spray I used, now I most want to get on with setting up a routine for my research. Get on with embedding it into daily work life and not treating it as something precious that only happens at a residency or during a long break.

I'm planning to try out and write about the 'trying out' of a little-and-often research schedule to see how it works for me. That makes me uneasy but I want to do so because that daily uneasiness (in this case, writing before work in the morning) might shift me out of my end-of-summer procrastination zone. Good timing to try it out for a couple of weeks first now, before term-time mania begins!