Sunflowers

I simply adore sunflowers and these, brought to me yesterday by my erstwhile dissertation advisor, who came to dinner after a long-time-no-see, are simply breathtaking.

Like a sunflower in late summer's full bloom, life at my small college on the hill resumes this week with the start of a new academic year, but I am on a research leave this semester so I won't be walking into any classrooms to teach until after the new calendar year has begun.

I really appreciate the opportunity to be on leave, however difficult it is to persuade students that this time is not to be devoted to them but to figure out my place in the world now that my father isn't in it, and to finish what needs to get done to secure that my pre-tenure review goes smoothly next semester.

The ability to devote a largely uninterrupted semester to my scholarship is quite exciting and allows me to carefully develop a long-term plan, including more thoroughly sketching my plans for developing a book.

However, after beginning my prospectus and feeling tired after simply recounting what I've done during these past two years, I think the time is come for me to sit back a little and enjoy the work already accomplished rather than always feeding my ambitious and workaholic hungers. As Dr. S has said to me, in light of her own experience, the track for tenure is a marathon, not a sprint. For two years, I've been sprinting to stay ahead so now it's a good time to stay the course but maintain a saner pace.

"Why do you do all this?" Dr. S recently asked, encouraging me to think about the possible answers and to ponder their significance and impact on my life.

I've been considering the question and can honestly say that a part of my ambition is ingrained, something I learned from my parents, especially my father who, before falling ill, and despite being retired, always had one project or another in the works, be it a new book, an essay, a conference, a meeting, a class. Even at the end, after he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he was thinking of a class he would've liked to design and had fully outlined what would have been a great book about his travels around the world as an electoral observer for the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Honestly, I don't know how to do nothing. I mean, I can lounge around with the best of them for a while, don't get me wrong. But I always have to have a mission, a project, something that makes me feel like I'm contributing to a larger cause.

That said, I'm not sure why I'm always trying to do more and more and more when enough is enough. That I'm still trying to figure out. I'm way past the time when I need to prove myself to anyone else so what it is, exactly, that drives me now?

"Driven," someone said when asked to describe me with a word, and I was shocked. And this was a few years ago, when I was still in graduate school. I am driven, and I am proud of it, but, as Dr. S has encouraged me to do, I want to figure out what am I driving to (other than the obvious achievement of tenure and recognition in my field) and why.

Most importantly, I want to answer my own question: "When will you know that you've arrived?"