Keeping Up...

This post, like its title, attempts to just keep up...Keep up with the class, keep up with the times, with others and myself.  

Picture this: A nomadic family living anywhere on Earth in nomadic times (whenever that may have been).  A mother, a father, and their two adolescent children roam the land, seeking only the next meal and fearing anything that may hinder that desire.  What does "keeping up" even mean to them?  Were there specific deadlines they had to meet or was life basically contingent upon who's not keeping warm and how many stomachs are growling?  Different times.

Keeping up is on my mind so much that a lot of times I will purposely find things to distract me and remove notions of deadlines and commitments from my mind.  The list of activities ranges from thirty minutes of Jeopardy to hours of reading in bed, which typically goes hand-in-hand with hours of catching up on zzz's.

Constructive procrastination is another outlet for putting responsibilities on hold and an alternative to totally checking out to Alex Trebek's voice.  By constructive procrastination, I mean taking that grand scheme of this week's (or this year's for that matter) to-do-list out of your pocket and placing tasks of lesser importance before those of greater importance in your mind's ultimate notion of what really needs to be done today.  For example, instead of getting all the work done today that I've been putting off (like this blog), I did laundry and cleaned up the house a bit.  Then I went to the library (after various other important tasks...i.e. watching football and eating food while watching football).  So maybe I didn't write that paper that is already late I say to myself, BUT I do have clean socks to walk around a clean kitchen in.

It's such a bummer to get caught up in this kind of cycle.  Constantly looking towards next week's deadlines and reevaluating what really needs to be done  can become gruesomely tiresome, verging upon maniacal. 

I've got a huge list of books I want to read, songs I want to hear again by artists I don't want to forget, and people, places and events I want to learn more about.  Now, let's get something straight first.  

I'm an awful time-budgeter.

I came to the library to write, and besides this blog I have only been reading since I got here four hours ago.  The Internet makes news never-ending (but that's another story), and I easily get caught up in it.  But when will I make a solid dent in that list of endless stuff?

I guess what I was going for here before I fell into my own soapbox was this:  Time and its best friends, deadlines and accountability, are easy to fall victim to.  Certainly, it is good to be held accountable for our endeavors in school, family, careers, etc.  But does there come a point where we must be more concerned with our own self?  Where we should look at ourselves and ask, "What kind of life do i want?"  The proverb, "Know thyself" seems to me to be essential for anyone trying to live a purposeful life.

Remember what Mark Twain said -- "I never let my schooling interfere with my education."