Taking Off and Landing

With any life-consuming prospect, be it parenthood or a doctoral program, there come a number of changes, not only to one’s routines, but to one’s self. You start looking at things in different ways; the pieces fit together slightly differently than they did before. In my case, I found myself looking at the Economist for insights as to how the Holy Spirit might be drawing all of this world together into something resembling the Kingdom of God. When the Bible makes your head hurt, go to British journalism.

One of the largest things that I’ve learned about myself in the last two years is that, against my own best desires, I throw myself into my work. After spending two years in retail reading and auditing classes and taking any writing gig I could get, I was a hungry little student going back in, and threw myself into it with total abandon. My assistantship that first year was a glorified work-study position, and a time for me to have 15 hours a week to read all the things I’d been missing out on, and in some ways, to learn to read all over again. But the work of grad school is like any other kind of hard discipline. First, you despise it because it’s knocking you down and breaking you over its knee. Then, you realize the benefits of it, and grow to appreciate it. Then, you see the internal logic of it, and grow to love it. And finally, with your mind and soul so fully atuned to how it works, you grow to need it.

And so, after spending three weeks in Africa, detoxing from another semester, I found myself yesterday afternoon in my room, churning out two book reviews and corresponding with some other folks on school-related stuff. In July. On a Saturday.

This has got to stop. On the one hand, the academic life doesn’t really have weekends or summers. I mean, yeah, you get three months off a year, but not really. Those months are filled with doing the things you didn’t get to do during the school year because you were working 80 hours a week.  It’s nothing more than habit, the product of training at the hands of a system designed to take a half-formed mind and turn it into a keen, slimmed-down thinking machine. You get used to doing this stuff, and so, at the end of the day, you don’t mind it: in fact, you love it.

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I think back to the professors I had in undergrad and how relaxed they appeared, or at least how relaxed I remember them appearing.  When I think harder, I see little wrinkles, furrowed brows, dark circles, mounds of grading. It’s funny how memory gives you the good stuff and blocks out the warning signs. I think that’s a trueism in general beyond those things you’re pursuing as a life goal, be it with regards to a relationship or whatever: the memory is the kindest filter, deleting the rough edges so that all your memories can sit well together in your brain.

Did these professors ever wonder what the hell they were doing? Did they ever curse their lot? Did they have balance? Did they get out? Every so often, I eye the back door and wonder if it’s not too late to run. But then I realize that I love this, and that there’s nothing I’d rather be doing, and that at this point, I’m too much a part of this to do other than change things from the inside.

Next: What the hell does a doctorate in theology look like?