Re-defining our time

Himanee Gupta-Carlson

A Seattle friend observed a few nights ago on Facebook that a sunset at 8 p.m. in May seems unduly late, whereas a sunset at the same time in August seems too early. The remark reminded me of the shortening days of summer that August ushers in, and with those shorter days, the onset of fall.

For educators, fall means a sudden up-step in pace. Course syllabi must be prepared, books must be ordered, classes are ready to start. New students will start to fill classrooms, even if these days so many of those classrooms exist in cyber space. E-mail, which slowed to a gentle trickle in August, will suddenly gush once again like a torrent of water rushing downward over and across boulders to the rapidly filling up pond below.

Or, maybe not.

My college has a twelve-month calendar, which is sort of like code for "no summers off." Prior to my arrival here, the prospect of always being at work would have sounded dismal if it had not been for two completely unrelated sets of circumstances. The first was that I had spent three years as an adjunct faculty member at two colleges, which did have summers off. Summers off for adjuncts, who are essentially contract hires, meant three months of no pay, which translated for me into part-time jobs as a tele-fundraiser, political canvasser, fitness coach, and, one year when I was really broke, a one-day gig as a field worker at a vegetable and fruit farm. It also meant calls to the unemployment office and a brief stint on food stamps. The second circumstance was a chat with a future colleague prior to my campus interview who happened to know my sister. "Someone may have mentioned that we have a twelve-month calendar, here," she said. "The advantage of it is that you get vacation time!"

This year, my vacation time has managed to stretch itself to delicious lengths. Beginning with a surgery in mid-April, I regularly took one or two days off from work a week, strategizing the time off around holidays and Fridays, which informally are regarded as professional development days for faculty. I did this with a few simple goals in mind:

1. I wanted to add a new layer of commitment to my daily writing practice, enhancing my three pages of first-thing-in-the-morning longhand free writing done in the spirit of "anything goes" with an evening gig of writing a minimum of 750 words on topics of a slightly more structured nature.

2. I wanted to be more active in the backyard farming venture that my husband and I had instigated when we moved to New York three years ago.

3. I wanted to kick up my fitness training for triathlons and marathons.

4. And, last but perhaps most significant, I had a book manuscript to revise.

What these goals required me to do was re-articulate some relationships of ideas and antinomies: vacation and work, time on and time off, pleasure and toil. Because I was never really entirely unplugged, I was never really off work. In a sense, then, I was simultaneously on vacation and away from my desk, and present for students and others who needed me almost as much as I would have been during the school year. I had days off on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays, and often for purposes of research, ethnography, and conference attendance, I was on the job on the traditional off days of Saturday and Sunday. In the process, work stopped being a job and evolved into pleasure. Toil, too, became something I associated less with poring over a student's assignment or degree plan and more with the healthful and rejuvenating work of growing food. The blurring of concepts resulted in a sort of relaxation that makes me wonder sometimes how a day that began with the rooster's crowing, involved writing on three separate projects, exercise, gardening and cooking, and ended with the late-night hooting of an owl could actually have a beginning and end. Time also blurred from set calibrations into a cyclical force governed by a sort of daily dance between the rhythms of nature and the day's to-do list. The list never was completely accomplished, but more got done than I expected.

        Is there a way to measure accomplishment? Six poems accepted by a writer's festival; one short story accepted by a social media story-writing site; a draft of terms defining hip-hop studies in place; a book manuscript that's 80 percent revised, eight energetic days away from completion. More accomplishments: The creation of five blogs to which I contribute regularly; a triathlon done; a 14-mile run for a marathon done; research trips to Seattle and Washington DC complete; scads of tomatoes, squash, and collards, among other veggies; 400-plus heads of garlic curing in the barn.

Now, the sun sets before 8 p.m. It is dark in our part of the globe by 8:30. In approximately five weeks, the fall equinox will occur, creating first two equal 12-hour chunks of daylight and night and then tipping the balance in favor of night.

I used to dread the loss of daylight because it signaled the onset of winter. Winter meant colder weather, discomfort, and perhaps for me in a symbolic sense, death.

Perhaps I disliked the concept of death in my earlier years because, like many humans, I feared getting old: Losing my faculties, my energy, my ability to run marathons. As a result, I treated fall as a race: Rush to the office, hurry up on the syllabi, caffein-ate myself, and write, read, grade, volunteer for committees, race to the meetings, squeeze in those workouts, and don't forget about yoga as if every day was going to be its last. And, predictably, I got nothing done. The days turned out to be long and short at the same time, and I was so busy running around that I never had time to stop and consider what needed to be done.

The shorter days now make me wonder if we might be able to redefine our understandings of fall. As academics, we see fall as the beginning. A new academic year, new courses, new calendar, new faculty hires, new faces and new possibilities. The newness makes us rush and plunge into life breathlessly; we don't want to be left behind. Perhaps, however, we have it wrong. Perhaps the fall is the time to slow down. To take in the newness, to approach the new calendar slowly as if it is our support and not our penalizer, reminding us of all the deadlines we're missing, the things that could have been done sooner, faster, better.

Maybe it's the time to remember that if we work on a twelve-month calendar, we have advantages. We have a full year of pay and we have vacation days.