It’s a little over two weeks since I finally sent my extensively re-written and somewhat lengthened chapter off in the likely vain hope that it might lead to a post-doc. This has obviously taken me far longer than I anticipated, unsurprisingly given that the pandemic landed in the middle of my plans and things jumped up the priority list ahead of the PhD. The process did underscore some useful things though.

Firstly that I can’t continually put my health on hold and do the PhD first. No matter whether it’s making sure I’m in good shape in case I get covid19 or managing existing fubars. Taking a walk, taking a break, these are things that are never urgent but are always important. So in figuring out a schedule that is manageable these things get done. This isn’t how the Eisenhower matrix works, but screw that, I don’t have anyone to delegate things to and research tends to sit a lot in that not urgent/important quadrant and can be planned. Having spent a lot of time on quadrant 1 stuff (if that’s how you want to characterise the ‘prioritise survival of self and friends/family’) it’s good to be dealing with this stuff again.

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This sounds like a luxury doesn’t it? Deciding what I will and won’t prioritise, and putting a walk (“How lovely!”) or a nap (“Wish I could!) into the schedule. But it’s actually a question of productivity as much as anything. Unless you have small children afoot and no equal partner there are in fact a minority of people who can’t do some activity and/or take some rest in order to support their health. (And those who can’t are not the ones telling me “How lovely! Wish I could!”). In fact they sound suspiciously like the people in this piece, who “hope to buckle down for a short stint until things get back to normal.” I join the author in wishing anyone who pursues that path the very best of luck and health and point again at the piece as being the only one I’ve read that actually gives sound advice from someone who has been there when the world changes.

So it was with some semblance of a plan and schedule already in place that I went yesterday to an online training course in building resilience. I wasn’t exactly sure I needed it but I was curious and thought it might be useful.

It did do what it said was on the tin, considered how you can use your strengths to cope in the crisis. But I think it needed to be franker. The world is changing rapidly and our old lives cannot be reached. Dealing with the basics in Maslow’s hierarchy has been necessary and may be again.

Only one of the models offered in the course seemd to me to sit well both with Maslow’s hierarchy and Aisha S. Ahmad’s piece in the Chronicle. The idea that you function (survive), overcome (mental shift) and adapt (a new normal). The number of new normals I’ve had in life is maybe unusual, maybe not – career changes, country moves, stints at home caring for family and serious disruptive ill-health seems more than a typical load at my point in a lifespan. In any case, I’ve certainly not arrived in my discipline through what is a supposedly standard route. But I have been here before, and know that the mental shift will happen, fight it as I may because who wouldn’t want their life to return to normal? And it is horrid, the unexpected death last weekend of a relative both from covid19 and not from covid19 (undiclosed and terminal cancer) shook me. The loss of the old seems to need to be acknowledged and mourned and models can’t reach. So I’ll finish with a poem ‘One Art’ by Elizabeth Bishop. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art