I must have done something good.

This morning I met with L from Safety. After six weeks of spending my days with nine year-olds it was incredibly refreshing to have a conversation that was mentally challenging. He went off on all kinds of tangents, stories, anecdotes, examples... Sometimes my brain had trouble keeping up.

I'm not a slow person, I'm not a slow thinker. But I had trouble, at times, finding the invisible threads of connection between the topic at hand and the tangents he went off on. Nonetheless, I enjoyed them. I enjoyed him.

I have had trouble for a long time being excited about my writing projects through this association. Though I care about language and care about communication, it's been difficult to muster a lot of enthusiasm for technical descriptions of heavy machinery and types of ladders.

Suddenly, talking to L, this changed and shifted. He told me he lost a brother in a construction accident and this was why he was so passionate about the safety project. And from him came the fire I needed to care about this project and do it well. It's strange, sometimes, how the human brain works (and doesn't work). All this time that I've been writing about safety my heart hasn't gotten involved in the reasons behind it. Even as I've typed the words "fatality" and "injury" and so forth, I haven't fully taken in how big a concept I was writing about and how important it truly is. Suddenly I had a human face and heart before me who knew firsthand the tragedy that could result from not implementing safety legislation, and suddenly I cared more than I have since this began. It makes this work have meaning. That was exactly what I needed.

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In spite of feeling fired up about safety again, I have spent the afternoon procrastinating. This is typical of setting my own schedule and my own hours. I put things off until deadlines get tight. It's the way I work. Most of the time I need a little pressure in order to be productive. But it's what makes working for myself wonderful. The reward for working efficiently under pressure is enjoying all the time off that precedes it. If I could do things in reverse order I'd enjoy it even more but I still think I'm lucky.

At this stage, having a steady teaching assignment two days a week, writing to do at home on my own schedule, and university students to visit within my own chosen hours, I feel as though I'm walking a nice line. A good balance between stability and steady human interaction, and freedom and solitude. I value all these things and I get frustrated with too little or too much of any of them. I've finally got enough teaching hours to warrant full benefits, and enough freelance time not to feel chained to the school. Perhaps I've found the perfect situation. We'll see.

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I'm thinking about making dinner for Shawn tonight. Sometimes I cannot believe how lucky I am to be sharing my life with him. My cooking isn't much of a treat, to be truthful, but I'd like to make the effort anyway to show him how much I've appreciated his help while I've been teaching full time again and also during my illness. He takes good care of me.

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