Dreams to Do

I can be honest here, right?

I’ve been wasting time.

Now, let me back up. I am crazy busy probably like you and everyone else you know. I am responsible for people, both big and small. I teach part-time. I try to maintain friendships and call my mother often. I haven’t been bored in six years.

Yet, even with a to-do list a mile long, I still manage to wait out the clock focusing on worthless things.

Part of it is my compulsive need to dwell on negative complexities. Better said, I will obsess over something I cannot fix. Case in point, my search terms on Twitter have mostly been about the highly competitive academic job market, where thousands of PhDs fight it out for publications and tenure-track jobs. I watch the tweets like a scoreboard. Someone just got an assistant professorship at this big school. Someone else finally got published in that journal. I commiserate with the many others still hustling for a shot at a full-time position. All of this takes up a considerable amount of time.

The irony of it all is that the time I spend wallowing in self-pity is time that would be better spent on, oh, say, revising my last (rejected) article. I could finish the two books that still sit half-composed on my computer. Essentially, I could get busy on my goals.

So, perhaps this post is not so much for you as it is for me. This morning, somewhere buried in my oldest daughters monologue about her thoughts, she blurted out, “'I’ve got dreams to do.”

I do too. And it’s time I get to it.