Less Rigor, More Rest.

Trusting yourself enough to not Do The Living Shit out of every thing every day is a skill.

But does it count if you’re only picking out seat cushions?

Rigor: Severity or strictness.  The quality of being extremely thorough, exhaustive, or accurate.  Demanding, difficult, or extreme conditions.

When I last discussed my sabbatical, it was about the design of my days.  They were certainly well designed, but the observant among my readers [honestly, any of them] likely noticed that they were still pretty much traditional working days.  It read a great deal like I’d transitioned into being unprofitably self-employed as opposed to “not working.”  I was in the process of getting comfortable with the reality of not having an employer and a schedule imposed by the needs of my teams,  but not addressing at all the idea of watching whole days go by without having slayed a lion  in the arena of my own design.  

 The American drive to prove yourself one of the Elect though constant work is legendary; in spite of most of us understanding it’s a compulsion, we do it anyway.   How do we know we’re winning if we have no solid way of keeping score?  Getting comfortable doing nothing all day is to potentially be uncomfortable going back to the Life.  What if our edge gets dulled and  we don’t want to do it anymore? What if we can’t ever go back?  Better the body never ceases the drive, even if the tasks we’re compelled to finish are ones we assigned ourselves.

A couple of things broke this  trance about three months in, which I’m now coming to appreciate is precisely when a true sabbatical really starts.  One, I finished my Python 3 certificate in a stressful blaze of a final project that cracked right into Christmas and New Year’s celebrations - far more encroachment than I’d ever allowed any of my day jobs.  Two, my partner went back to work after a year long (involuntary) sabbatical of his own.  With the addition of an income,  the house suddenly got interesting, and I had the energy and interest for all the little decoration projects I’d mentally planned when I bought the place three years ago, dropped my moving boxes in all the  rooms and went back to work.  Finally, my daughter, who has always been a benevolent but equal partner in my career, needed to pick out a high school during a time of being at a complete low point socially and academically.  She actually needed extra mommin’, for once at a time where there was plenty on hand. 

The shape of my days has honestly ceded the grid to  the shape of my weeks. The weekend still exists and is three days long [going to keep insisting on that one].  I’m trying to not let it feel like the end of the world if I don’t do my school work on a strictly slotted schedule and I’m not at my co-working desk at precisely  9am.  I haven’t put on a pair of pants that aren’t jeans since the New Year (I think. Somewhere along the line my record keeping stopped.)  I go back to bed for 30 minutes after the school run, which feels like both a sin and a spa day every time I do it.   I see my trainer at 9am as opposed to in the evenings, so I’m not “productive” at all until almost lunch.  Indeed, there might be entire days where the ONLY things I do are kid and house tasks - though I freely admit to those setting my teeth on edge.  

Then there’s Township (known as ‘Tiny Town’ in my house.) I spend hours on this game, which can only be best described as Civilization 2 without the uprisings and sieges.  Responsibility for construction, manufacturing, resource planning, farming, mining, trade negotiation and zoo management in this  micro city seems to be fulfilling some hyperactive  impulse not easily sated by long stretches of paying attention to just one thing.  All rigor, I suppose, needs an outlet.

Outside of having become a gamer on a level that could potentially qualify me for a lucrative Twitch stream, I’m am still doing classes, gradually ticking off the things I wanted to have time to learn but never did.  The pace has slowed; while I did the Python 3 certification in three months, the next one will be taking me a great deal more time.   I’m now really doing the certification in Applied Data Science that caused me to backtrack into basic Python.  The data science certificate work is hard, starting out with an introductory class in Python that feels reminiscent of Ricky Bobby’s NASCAR teaching style -  I got mauled by a cougar, ruined my Crystal Gayle t-shirt, and so far have learned almost nothing about the actual data science.

On the other hand, I picked up what I’m now thinking of as “the missing class” in financial fluency for product management leaders on Maven - and as a bonus have been able to use pandas for my homework there.   So I’m not sure if I’m doing science? But I’m a lot happier working in Jupyter Notebooks than I’ve ever was in Excel, which feels like a big win moving forward no matter where I ultimately land next.

And then finally, my sneaky better half has proposed the idea of my doing none of these projects and instead taking on the project of finishing (which means starting) all of the books in my emotional support bedside pile.  The mind boggles.  Nothing but recreational reading??  Naturally there’d have to be a a daily schedule. And rules.  And I’d blog about it. 

…apparently I’ve not completely recovered from rigor.  Maybe I don’t need to worry about not being able to go back when I’m ready.