Committee meetings can help you to collect your thoughts and give you a topographical view of your research. You zoom out from all the nitty gritty and see the lay of the land. You re-establish your frame of reference which is essential to directing your future efforts in a productive way. In anticipation of these types of discussions, I included a master list in my presentation of all the things I needed to do until the date I'm "supposed" to graduate (i.e. four years after I started).
"Things to do in the next 20 months"
There was a problem with the list though...
If I continued to look at it I would surely descend into madness. The logistics of completing its many elements began to unhinge my brain. "Stupid list, I should never have created you" I thought to myself.
But the list certainly needed to be created and it certainly could not be destroyed. Despite my resentment, it served an extremely valuable purpose as it precipitated conversations with people who are many times wiser and more experienced than I about how the hell I was going to get everything done!
However, the committee meeting scared me. I have been VERY busy ever since (including the holidays) and I am starting to feel pretty stressed. As all things do, the stress and negativity has started to compound on itself. I have started to think about how hard I would need to work to finish everything on the list versus how hard I am working now and how long I could hope to keep up this pace. Since I'm stressed, it's no surprise that I fall short in all of my projections. This type of thinking clearly isn't very helpful. So the question is, "When you're on a journey with poorly defined milestones and an uncertain end, how do you keep yourself from dwelling on how much further you have to go?"
Now previously I have written about how tangible progress in a graduate degree tends to show up later on, and this does provide me with a bit of comfort. Maybe I'll make it through the list quicker than I think! But when you're in the thick of it sometimes it's hard to maintain a perspective built around an abstraction that you haven't seen play out before. Fortunately, a connection between this situation and one of my more concrete experiences recently occurred to me. A memory of a feeling I had had once drifted back to me - a memory that involved running.
Two years ago now a group of buddies and I decided to do the Tough Mudder obstacle course challenge. The course was to be 16 km long, but at that time running 5 km down-hill in a straight line would reduce me to a sweaty oxygen-deprived heap! So in preparation, a few times a week I would go for runs and I would try to increase the distance each time. I slowly learned how to pace myself and how to breath properly. Looking back though, what I realize now is that a lot of what I needed to learn was the proper way to think! When I started, my mind was always on how far I had come and how far I had yet to go. I can vividly remember how these thoughts would line my shoes with lead, make me uncomfortably aware of the sweat on my brow, and discourage my every step. Over-time I learned that if I instead focused on where I was, the scenery, my breathing, my pacing, that I could just keep running further and further every week. Eventually I was up to 15 km+ runs several times a week and finished some of them off with dashes up the local ski-hill for good measure.
Now as I run the grad-school marathon I can think back to how I felt while I was learning to run long distances and remind myself in VERY real terms why I shouldn't dwell on how much further I have to go. After-all I don't want to line my brain with lead! So for everyone out there who has a mental marathon to run, try training for a physical one! You may be surprised by what you learn!
No comments:
Post a Comment