Compos Mentis

(A Little Strange)

I've been trying to distract myself recently. I thought rather naively that senior year would come and I would be able to fall back from school a bit, maybe get a job and maybe have some more time to write and do music. Now, in a sense I was right on the money. My classes this term are pretty easy and don't require much work. But the rest of my life has thrown me some stress: trying to figure out what I'm going to do in the future, how I'm going to do it, and also trying to go through a ton of administrative red tape in transferring the credits I earned in England here. (To be fair, the red tape isn't all that bad. I don't have to fill out too many forms. It's just the people who are difficult.) All of this and a fair amount of stress in my personal life has thrown my original plan out of sync.

What was my response? To throw myself into work even more than I had originally intended. I had the same amount of time to kill, just without the relaxation I had hoped for. So, when my history of modern philosophy teacher assigns readings from, say, Leibnitz, I go out and read two books about Leibnitz so I can understand him better. For a presentation I'm giving in my philosophy seminar, I'm reading all of the published works of Wittgenstein in order to better analyze the four or five pages I was assigned to critique. I've been consistently reading two books outside of assigned reading at any given time, one of which was in Latin and took me far longer than I would have hoped. I'm teaching myself how to play the piano, and am still putting nearly an hour a day into guitar. I'm continuing to learn Greek. I've already read three books for my honors thesis and I've started a fourth.

I'm not sure this was a usual response to stress, but it's been working. Instead of thinking about all of the things which are out out of my hands, all of the things I can't change, I've occupied myself so much with things that I enjoy doing that any work I can do towards, say, graduating or getting into the JET program gets done because I can focus on it as the task at hand.

There are downsides. I can't pay attention to everything at once, so things slip. I've started working on my last short story for the set (mostly by writing in class) but it took me a good month to get an idea going for it from the end of my last one. And I know soon I'll have to start looking into it more, since the deadline is coming up and it takes me a long time to edit things. But other things have dropped too. I remember freshman year on the weekends doing something each night and then staying up until three or four in the morning on a regular basis. Now, if I go to a party, usually I only spend a little while there before I go home and practice Greek before bed. And my non-fiction writing only comes in fits and spurts - I wrote eight pages on consciousness yesterday after having my notebook lay fallow for about three weeks. And of course there is the habitual dropping of writing on my blog.

Of course no coping mechanism is perfect, and even on my good periods stuff doesn't get done that needs to get done. Occasionally I get ahead of the power curve; occasionally I even feel unstressed. But the most important thing that has allowed me to have this kind of focus is something I believe I picked up in England; the idea that this too shall pass. On the good days as well as the bad, I know that the feeling is transistory as well as the situation being transistory. Something will happen and I will have to deal with that. This understanding allows me to push aside, for the moment, any despair or anger that I may have concerning my present situation and to just focus on what needs to get done, even if I'm somewhat artificially creating a need to cope with extreme circumstances. And this sense of release of my emotion in order to get things done may be particularly surprising as it is a sign that I may in fact be grown up.

posted by Emmett @ 14:57