It’s been clear to me for a very long time that my body and mind move in very long cycles of writing, not writing, or writing first muddles and drafts of complex things and then refining them, also over a long time. It is even more clear to me now that I've moved into another one of these periods of assembling the basic material for something new.
At work we have an employee program run by fellow-employee volunteers, called the work / life balance program. My HMO also recommends work / life balance and runs, sometimes, free classes for those of us having difficulty finding time for our actual lives.
It has escaped their notice however that jobs – such as are left to us – are not structured to accommodate this kind of cycle. And as long as the economy uses the employment / income model of roughly the last hundred years, they won't be.
There is no balance possible when I need a month or two to concentrate on what I’m doing – not because I'm a poncy pretentious artist, but because my mind cannot be in two modes at once. When I'm in this phase and totally preoccupied I can barely do arithmetic, let alone the myriad things I need to do to stay competent at my job.
This complete mind-fog is part of my fundamental cycle.
There is no balance possible. The job takes precedence: I have to earn our livings, housing, food, clothing, medical care.
It's very likely that most of what I feel ready to produce will never be completed, or maybe even begun.
Just don't tell me it's because I lack time-management skills.
The notion that work of originality or depth can be done without something close to total immersion – that promulgated, amplified, prettified, zen-veneered, pietistic, blame-shifting, money- and interest-laden notion – is false from top to toe.
It's (another piece of) industrial propaganda.
