High-Intensity Work Moments

I was in a meeting last week. Which meeting? There’s no way to tell. The end of February was a blur of meetings. Blur of email. Blur of words.

Anyway, in all of that blur, one of my colleagues said something like: “I realized, this morning, that I’m in a high-intensity work moment.”

I laughed. And then that phrase came back to me as I raced from this conference room to that, one person to another, and tried to complete task after task (after task, after task.)

Now I’m thinking to myself that I may or may not be in a high-intensity work moment.

***

I’ll spare you the boring details, but I suppose I’ve been in high-intensity work moments since the fall of 2022. Moving to Iowa City and settling into my role as a coordinator of a largish program in a flagship research one university proved laborious. Emotionally laborious. Intellectually laborious. And, most surprisingly to me, physically laborious in the sense that emotional and intellectual stress showed up in my body.

Laborious is a wonderful words. I imagine a British person with the crookedest of teeth and the steamiest cup of tea using such a word Maybe a top hat too. They’d really stretch the word out.

“Certainly, sir, your incessant writing is lab-oooooooooo-rious,” they might say.

I’d look at them with my an American cut in my American jib and knock his teeth right out of his blimey head.

Just kidding. I wouldn’t do that. I’m a pacifist through and through. And I worry about leaning into American cuts in our American jibs right now. There’s far too much nationalism happening in my country of origin right now. Beware the seduction of empire. Violence, fear, and insecurity will steal your soul.

Back to my point about labor. I’ve been spending so much of myself as I’ve learned how to navigate the moment I’m in – a moment that is characterized so much by my job as a humble Associate Professor of English Education, PhD. I’ve learned a lot over the last three years. I’ve taken quite a few hits. But I’m still here, musing about the word laborious in this lab-oooooooooo-rious piece of writing.

***

I figured all sorts of emotional, intellectual, and physical things out this fall. That sense-making was a long time coming. And it wasn’t pretty. It was something of an existential wail. And I am not pretending that I’m done with existential wailing. So far as I can tell, our lives in these fleeting moments are and probably should be characterized by some sort of existential wailing. Being alive is hard. Still, I’ve made a little peace and found a little light over the last few months. I can’t really say how or why. Articulating ways that people change over time is an exceedingly difficult task. That’s what makes the work of teaching and learning and understanding teaching and learning so compelling to me. There’s so much complexity to figure out, if you’re doing it right.

I’m okay right now. And I’m not okay. And that’s okay. This is the mantra that’s been spilling out of me. I could probably write one hell of a self-help book. My problem is genre. It’s hard for me to color in-between the lines, my best writing gets away from me, and the kind of vitality I’m after often resists classification.

High-intensity work moments be damned, I’m still after vitality. I think that’s enough for now.