Maybe that overstates the case, but what a busy time of year! Good busy. Crazy busy. Dynamic, engaging, exhausting. Surprising. One expects the rush toward the start of the semester, and the storm of grading and student panic and project deadlines near the end of the semester, but the October surge sweeps one up in a vortex of falling leaves and student essays . . . of dissertation work and student advising, grant applications and the job market season opener, letters of recommendation for former students applying to grad school, planning, conferences, proposals, sustaining the day-to-day classroom vigor, reading and responding to papers, the course blog . . .
October is the veritable 13.1 mile mark in the innovation marathon.
Add to that travel (and the unexpected, untimely death of our alternator while driving through Gary, Indiana), a wedding, two toddlers at Halloween, and
THE ELECTION (echos)---whew, baby-baby.
Still---and just maybe this is a divine madness---I wouldn't want it any other way. I've only just begun to realize that a central tenet of my life's philosophy is
From chaos, order. This has always been the case; this is, for better or worse, my way. So as the semester pushes on, as I continue to gather more momentum than moss and feel that I am, like Yeats' falcon, turning and turning in the widening gyre---as the election nears with all of its chaotic, piercing, frenzied energy, and I am reminded again of Yeats' lines
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
---I know that what feels like the Tyranny of the Urgent is really no more than the view from the eye of the storm, a prerequisite for progress, the chaos that precedes order.
And rather than be tyrannized, I choose to conquer.
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