Panic Mode

There are three weeks left in the semester at CU. The students are starting to enter panic mode (I first made the typo of writing "manic" mode, but they are really the same thing), and I need to resist entering panic mode myself.

Three weeks! And during this time, I have one more major set of papers to grade, a book to revise, a talk to give at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in San Diego, a house guest (a beloved high school friend from New Jersey whose daughter is in my Intro to Ethics class this year), Holy Week (where I'm taking part in our Good Friday production of "Women of the Cross" playing a composite character representing Mary-and-Martha, Peter's mother-in-law, the Centurion's daughter, and who knows else - must start memorizing those lines!). And my brother-in-law is in town, and I want to help him in his herculean task of beginning to clean out Grandpa's house. And I have a set of book reviews that are due, and a manuscript to review for a journal, and conference submissions to review for our department's Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress (RoME), and manuscripts to read for my mentees, and - and - and!!

But panic mode helps nobody. Panic mode is unproductively paralyzing.

First: a reality check. A lot of these things on my list - the vast majority of them - are actually FUN. I WANT to do these things. I LOVE doing these things. So quit yer complainin'!

Second: I do not have to do all of these things TODAY. Today all I HAVE to do is teach my two classes, rehearse for the production of Sartre's No Exit that my TAs and I are putting on in the Intro to Ethics class on Wednesday, and attend my writing group meeting tonight. In addition I also plan to write three book reviews (actually, two of them are already done, as I got up bright and early to do them, and the other I'll do as soon as I finish writing this blog post) and read just five of the twenty submissions for RoME assigned to me. I can do that! I don't have to have my house guest today; I don't have to fly to San Diego today; I don't have to put on the Holy Week play today - in fact, I can't do any of those things today even if I wanted to, so there is no point in even putting them on my to-do list for today.

So: no panic/manic mode for me. Just a few pleasant and productive activities today, and a few more tomorrow, and a few more the day after that, and it will all get done, and the rest of my life will be wonderful.