Spent the last two weeks feeling completely overwhelmed - that's a word that gets used too often, but I think it is the best word for the experience. It started when I got sick. Usually I can just keep going (with a fair bit of whining) and power my way through a sickness but this time I was in bed for two days - I even missed a hockey game.It was then that I realized how little margin there is in my time. I have spent the last two weeks trying to pick up the dropped balls in all areas of my life. That put me behind in reading and writing assignments for my PhD classes.I had a hard time getting everything done for church. I made a promise that I wouldn't carve time out from my family to do my studies and it was very tempting to go back on this promise. They are the easiest people to rob time from - but they are also the most important and so I fought the urge, handed in some papers late and kept playing catch-up.

For the first time in a long time I felt good about my productivity yesterday. I locked myself in the home office and plowed through several articles and finished off a couple more papers. Part of my problem is that I forget about time when I am interacting with the material I am studying. Much like a jogger who loses track of the miles when 'runner's high' kicks in, I can literally have the day evaporate when I get immersed in a text (sort of a 'reader's high'). Lately I have been totally geeked on the post-structuralist writings of Bonnie Norton (who I saw at TESL 2009), Homi Bhabha, Claire Kramsch, etc. Of particular interest is their (re)conceptualization of identity and the creation of a third place when cultures intersect.

In another class I have been reading Chinese philosophers Suntze (The Art of War) and Laotze (The Tao Te Ching) and waxing elequently on their advice to leaders. I have read The Tao Te Ching before, but I was younger and didn't get it. I decided to come back to it when I was older and had a better shot at understanding it. Well, I didn't get it at 15 and I am still fuzzy at 39 so I guess I will try again at 55 or so. One of Laotze's big things is this idea of Wei Wu Wei (action without action) or just letting stuff take its own course. I was thinking about it this last week in how it might connect with modern living and one of the guys on my hockey team gave me a great illustration of it (although to be honest he never actually referred to it as "an exemplar manifestation of the Taoist concept of "wei wu wei"). We won our game and so everybody was a little chattier in the dressing room afterwords and talked about the pucks that went in and the numerous near misses. That's when John said "The problem with the last chance was I had too much time to think about it...if I would've just shot it I would have scored. I always play better when I just play and don't think about it" I was about to point out how that lines up with the Tao Te Ching's teaching, but decided to just keep unlacing my skates. It would've been another case of 'too much thinking.'

Migwec,
Ehkosit.