The Overhaul

This past month has been filled with a lot of realizations. One happens to be that, a person can do many things, but not many things well. 

Between teaching college students writing and yoga, taking graduate level courses, doing the typical soccer mom shuffle to practices and games, keeping the dog and fish alive, tutoring the anxious populace, and generally all that comes with the different roles played as mother, wife, daughter, friend, exercise instructor etc, I realize I have to scale back somewhere.  I could rattle off a dozen reasons why one should not carry such a heavy load.  Ultimately I've learned that the more I try to do, the quality of what I produce is watered down and suffers greatly by being pulled in so many directions.

When I turned 39 this year (just a short month ago), I had high hopes to keep up my journaling.  There's so much that happens over a course of year that I cannot recover-- feelings, special moments that I shared with the children, milestones.  This is one of the things that has truly fallen by the wayside as I try to "invent" time to sit down to write.  Even as I type this, I am supposed to be reading, grading papers, watching the movie based on my graduate readings, commenting on our discussion board, calculating final grade.  I'm putting it all off as my mind feels too full to accomplish those goals.

With the steady rise in my responsibilities, my workouts have also suffered.  Yesterday I ran a couple of miles before getting ready for work, and I was immediately reminded of why I so desperately enjoy having exercise in my daily regimen.  It's personal time I desperately need, and getting the blood flowing keeps me energized during the day.  I've spent almost the entire last year in an exercise lull.  Granted, some of that was brought on by cancer and recovery, but I no longer feel the pang of abdominal discomfort from too much movement.  I'm able to do the things I used to do; for instance, for the past two days I've jumped rope, which was once a level of jostling that my body couldn't take.

So with all that said, I'm again dialing back, and the only way I can do that is to let go of something.  I let my manager at the college's writing center know that I wouldn't be back in the spring to tutor.  It is easy money, but it is rather frustrating as well, and the time spent there could be better spent working on the two graduate courses I have coming this spring.  It will also help the writing and yoga courses I teach during the semester. I'm not putting in the energy I should be for those classes -- as I had spent a good part of my summer prepping a new way of teaching the yoga course, yet I never implemented it.  It's a shame.  I'll try again for sure.

So as the year comes to a close, I'm hoping to be better organized and produce better work.  It's a commitment to not just putting together classes at the last minute, or half-ass writing a paper for class, or forgetting that exercise is part of completing my day.  Narrowing the focus for next year and we've still got a month to go -- now that's thinking ahead!