Shirk-Life Balance

Back at work for a while now.

I started back with such good intentions, too. My clothes would be ironed and ready the night before, lunch prepared and ready in the fridge. I would be cheerful to my loved ones in the morning.

A week or two later, and, well, I iron my clothes, in a manner of speaking, before tumbling out of the door. The other stuff? Aspirations, I think. When it gets to the point that I know what day it is by what soup Prêt has on that day, I will kick myself back into focus. Cheerful to the peeps? Yeah, whatever.

The big aspiration was, of course, a whole new attitude to work. Work was going to be X hours of fulfilling focus per day. But work would have its strict limits and I would find that elusive balance.

The trouble is, work has a way of ingratiating itself in the inner core bit of you that you want to keep inviolate. Some traitorous nugget of your conscious somehow manages to find aspects of the work attractive and it then forces its way to the front of your priorities.

The kind of work I do involves a mix of data and legal analysis, client contact and dispute resolution. The sensible bit wants to stop at 1 o’clock and pray, and eat, and live...The fifth column bit insists on digging deeper, widening the scope of my analysis, finding that acute argument, and before you know it it’s 5.30pm and you should have gone home half an hour ago. The dry sandwich has lodged itself in your upper gut, your eyes are dry and you wish you had taken your shoes off, like, ages back. But, but...you just had to go on and finish off, didn’t want to interrupt that all important flow

This is how modern work culture cunningly co-opts our better nature, our best intentions, our sense of self worth, all in the aid of –well, not me, I think.

I have to get better at getting worse.