46º and sunny all the way around ~ heading up to a perfect 68º and sending a hurry-up signal to spring for all of my friends in the upper Midwest who have been dealing with snow!
When life hands you many great opportunities all at once — no — when you’ve worked hard and created many great opportunities for yourself all at once, life itself can become a bit overwhelming. Burnout may occur. (For me, this was not a “may” but a “did.”) With multiple projects to juggle, alongside home/family/friend responsibilities, recreation & downtime, I’ve started thinking about my daily work in terms of triage.
At first, this sounds dire. It calls to mind mass casualties and the need to put worst cases first. It seems to buy into a life of running around putting out fires, and I confess, that’s how I tried to live my life once all the great opportunities arrived. However, I’ve recently recast the idea of triaging things that need my attention into a more positive light. Instead of prioritizing the most difficult, pressing, or complex task, I am now prioritizing (or trying to) those tasks that match my goals and values.
This change in approach is largely due to working with my therapist post-burnout. She uses, and I recommend, the Values Cards by Marie McNamara and John Veeken as a way to examine your core values and to reset your goals around those values. In fact, I ended up buying my own pack of these cards. I don’t use them often, but I can see revisiting them every year to double check where I am and where I want to go.
Based on my use of the pack, CREATIVITY arose as one of my top 3 values, and stayed there when I revisited the cards 3 months later. Through therapy, I came to see how failing to prioritize time for creative acts was one cause for my burnout. My life was out of balance and, eventually, my mind and body rebelled against it. Re-committing to this blog is one way I plan to reconnect with creative acts on a regular basis. In the past, posting draft notes of new poems kept me accountable to a goal of writing my third book, and I plan to use posting about creative acts in the same way.
Today’s creative act: In the midst of a very busy time in terms of teaching duties, I paused this morning to read for pleasure. The book: The Memory of Now by Geet Chaturvedi, translated by Anita Gopalan, and publised in a beautiful art book edition by Anomalous Press. I picked this up at AWP last month; it doesn’t look like it is available for distribution/purchase yet, but you might want to bookmark it.
