The Un-stretched Rubber Band

In the back of my head, well, I knew this day was coming.  For the record, I even tried to prepare for it, but we all know how that old saying about "... best-laid plans..." goes.  "This day" and "it" refers to how I feel after having finished school related stuff(1).  The best way I can describe it is via a rubber band:

You stretch it and stretch it and stretch it.  Miraculously, it doesn't break.  But you do eventually let go of it, and what's left, after it snaps back, is a mere shadow of the formerly stretched self, formless and misshapen.  

That's where I'm at right here and now.

As a side note, I almost constantly...without exaggeration...have a song playing in my head.  As I was thinking about this topic during the quiet hours of this morning, the following song lyric came to mind:

"And if anything, 
then there's your sign of the times

I was alive and waited, waited
I was alive and waited for this,
Right here, right now"(2)

Sign of the times indeed.

Call it a funk.  Call it a rut.  This has happened to me before.  And will likely happen again.

There isn't much of a solution here.  No "chemical willy"(3) would be of help; besides, I'm simply adamant about the fact that, when all is said and done, I never want anything (including pharmacology) to come between me and my ability to truly experience life...the good, the bad, and the over-stretched rubber-band.  That could be either a truly enlightened concept on my part or incredibly stupid.  Both are likely to be correct.

Now I could find some other big thing to do.  And maybe that will happen.  But at the moment, "right here and now" I just don't have the mental juice for that sort of thing.  In as much as I feel as if I should be doing something big, part of me also knows that I need to rest, both mentally and physically.  The latter, by the way, has always been something of a challenge; as evidence, I can point to my having woken up at 5am this morning.  On a Saturday.

So what's left?  Maybe make a list of things I want to get done over the next few months.  Working outside is always sort of enjoyable for me.  As someone who has worked in the business world for three decades, complete with its tendency towards tremendous effort being put into things where there is no tangible outcome, something like cutting the grass has a significant benefit:  Before the work, the grass is high, after the work the grass is low.  

If only it were that easy in our professional lives.

(1) See THIS posting, among others.
(2) Jesus Jones, "Right Here Right Now"
(3) A phrase used by the late Hunter S. Thompson somewhere in The Great Shark Hunt.