Out of Sync

I often feel out of sync with the man-made universe. When I am doing a job that requires some amount of creativity, planning or thinking, I am stifled by the 9-to-5, Monday through Friday routine. My creative energies ebb and flow according to some plan that doesn’t align itself well with what we’ve defined as a “normal” workweek.

Two things this week have disrupted my work energy: the transition from daylight savings time last weekend and now a mandated furlough day this coming Monday, forcing me to take a three day weekend now.

I am extremely sensitive to daylight, so when the hour shift in time came this week, I wound up oversleeping. Usually I wake up easily without the help of an alarm (though I keep one set just in case), but this week I never even heard the alarm at 6 AM. I slept soundly and comfortably until 6:45 or, one day 7:10. Oops.

But once I got up and got going, I discovered I was energized to do my job. This week was a lot of deskwork, but I came back motivated from a three-day conference last week. I had several productive meetings and encounters during the week, and I felt things clicking into place. After several long days at the office, I was accomplishing things.

And then Friday night arrived and it all came to a screeching halt. Being interrupted by a normal weekend is bad enough, but being interrupted by a three day weekend ending in a day where you’re not allowed to do any work at all is, right now, torture.

And to think of all those weeks when I so desperately needed a three day break. There are times for all of us when time away from the office would do us more good than time at the office. This isn’t one of them. Sure, I could go in on Saturday or even Sunday, no rules against that, and I did bring work home just in case, but it’s almost too late. The curtain has fallen, and the flow interrupted. Knowing I can’t work on Monday and that I should try to be otherwise productive with my allowed time off has killed my momentum.

I pray for the wisdom that some day I will have the confidence to follow my energies. That when I need time away doing other things, when I am being energized by life outside of work, that I will allow myself to follow, knowing full well that the energy for work will come again, and I will more than make up for the time off by being fully focused and many times more productive. And, to be able to find a way to do it in a place that doesn’t believe in alarm clocks, but allows me to track my day by the rising and the setting of the sun.