A man enters university and rushes to do his work with the goal of hoarding time to himself. Every day is a push to finish everything in the hopes of alone time or powering through until a break. The breaks come and go quickly, and the work continues — still biding time until the next break. Graduation comes and the same logic meets the working world: head down, doing all the work, always with an eye on the next vacation. Vacations always end too soon, and the cycle repeats. Decades pass, most of which the man spends in early anticipation of retirement. Retirement finally comes and the man cannot relax, feeling numb from decades of keeping an eye on the calendar in search of the next chunk of downtime.
I heard this story 23 years ago from an anti-Indian Point activist who came to our school and told us he’d just about won his battle against the troubled nuclear reactor. (It would be another 17 years before he could breathe a sigh of relief.) It’s a story I think about often, especially when I find myself with down time free from any obligations or so burnt out that I wish for down time to get back to baseline burnout.
You’re catching me in the former scenario for the first time in over four years. For the next week, I am Scott Steinhardt, funemployed citizen and person trying and failing to figure out how to spend said week. I know that sometime in the next year, I will look back at this point in time and wish I had more planned (direction, travel plans, something exotic, etc.) with the express purpose of chilling the fuck out. Instead, I am winging it: biking around, seeing friends, making up for lost time with my wife (who very much did not like the hours and conditions I operated under since 2022 or so), going to restaurants (which I can finally afford again), and generally not making plans.
I biked to Red Hook today because I saw an interesting building and followed a path there. I walked with a friend from Houston to 34th because I’m on my own time, thank you very much, and am obliged to do fuck all. I’m attending a bagel crawl (with ample gluten free options, natch), going to a lecture, and having dinner with a close friend over the next five days. Everything between that and the plane I take next Saturday just, like, happens. It’s that free jazz analogy I love so much: mess that ends up harmonious or at least comprehensible at some point. Maybe.
Was this the best summer of my life? Who am I to qualify my summers? is how I’d respond to such a question. I can say with a fair amount of certainty that this is the summer where I recognized it was summer as opposed to looking down in spring and up during fall, wondering what I missed over three months. Perhaps this summer made me actually like summer, though leaving my job and soon starting an amazing new one certainly helped. As did fortifying my existing friendships locally and elsewhere, being outside, and discovering exciting new ways to stave off anxiety.
Maybe I do too much all the time and not doing anything this week is my response, of sorts. Perhaps the lack of direction is because I’m about to be regimented and overplanned up to my eyeballs (as I don’t know how to do it any other way). There’s always a chance I’m greatly overthinking things, but like all things this week, writing this started on a whim. Yet instead of rushing through it and the rest of the day/night/week, I’ll take the time to acknowledge the time I have now and find myself genuinely surprised when the next break appears.