Trying to analyze the transition that happens in academia is really interesting to me for a couple of reasons (I'm now talking about those of us who teach fall and winter, but not summer or anything in between - in Michigan, there's a crazy spring half-term in addition to the summer term). It's probably because in my ninth year I'm still totally not used to the rhythm of them, even though they ebb and flow in really predictable patterns. The semester is always the same length, 14 weeks, and, teaching the same subjects, the arch is familiar too. The semester has three parts to - beginning, middle and end - that include their own smaller transitions. In between the fall and winter semesters there is a short break - this year, I got a whopping five days off. Between winter and fall, however, we get close to four months off from teaching. This is where magic is supposed to happen. And this is also the reason why I will never complain about my job, even when I have to work 24/7 (none of this is complaint - I'm just trying to analyze to understand what happens in my head...). The magical period otherwise known as summer makes life good.

The semesters themselves are a lot like a screw that gets tighter and tighter as they progress. In the fall, my colleagues are genuinely nice people who really enjoy each others company (the RC retreat in August is a hoot and a lot of fun). Come December though, people seem pretty tightly wound. Last year we had the shortest break ever (something about the way the holidays fall on certain days of the week). I had 10 days between the day I turned in grades and the first day of the new semester. Barely enough time to transition OUT of the old semester, just enough time to start feeling so very tired, definitely not enough time to reach the bottom of the exhaustion, let alone start climbing out of it and to recharge. The screw loosened a little bit, but was still pretty tightly wound (maybe 2/3?) Definitely one of those transitions where by sheer will I forced the stuff that was getting loose in the head to stay put, knowing that I would not have time to find new place for it. April used to be my favorite month of the year (Easter, birthday, spring, 1st of May Eve...) and now it's probably survivable (hang on to your hats territory). By the last few weeks of classes, the screw is wound so tight that we're  barely hanging on - there's so much that has to get done by the deadline, and no choice in any of it.   

In contrast to the winter break, we've now been off for about a month. Have I done any of the stuff I said I would? Not yet. There's still hope. In the last week I finally hit what I hope is the bottom of the exhaustion.

The pattern of this particular transition seems interesting, if for no other reason then the time that I can afford it! It seems that each school year, I can keep on running on the fumes and get something done for about a week or two after graduation (usually it's the stuff that I've been planning on doing for the past three months...). Then I start slowing down, looking at my list of things to do but feeling no particular urgency to do them right at this very moment...then, for about a week, I just can't bring myself to do anything. It almost seems like a chemical reaction, in some sense depression-like (although I know that real depression is very serious, and doesn't just last a week)...and usually, after a week or so I decide it's time to start getting things done, and I start slowly re-energizing, and re-focusing on being a different kind of creative person. Every year, I plan on transitioning faster, getting more stuff done, avoiding the bottom...but it doesn't really work that way. I haven't gotten to the re-energizing part yet. But I did practice some scales and etudes today, because I wanted to. Is there something to learn here? I'm actually not sure yet, maybe I'll figure it out this year...

Yesterday at a cello lesson we were working on a very specific technical thing - how to transition from one kind of trill to another. It dawned on me that in purely technical transitions what matters most is the preparation: in other words, once you've transitioned, you're there, the transition happens before the event. In classical music, the events themselves are predictable because of music that is composed and practiced, so anticipation is easy (sort of). Wouldn't it be great if we could anticipate more in real life as well, and ease the transitions that way? 

In music, transitions are the time in between events - transitioning from the first theme area to the second theme area in a Sonata-Allegro form. In life, it's more like the time immediately before and after an event - getting used to the idea of moving from your childhood home to a college dorm, then getting used to the new reality after the event (a 3-part transition: before, during and after an event). In either case, they can vary in duration and magnitude. In the mind, transitions seem to BE the events. I was looking for a good metafor and came up with earthquakes...which also have duration and magnitude. Imagine that your mind is a room (or a suite of rooms) - it has a certain organization, folders, shelves, notebooks, office supplies, a recliner... The longer your mind stays in the same state, the more solidified this organization gets (for me, the idea folder gets buried in the busy stuff and kind of disappears in the pile of things "to do") . Then there is a change, the catalyst can be an event in the real world, but it doesn't have to be - the change can be slow and stealthy, fast and violent, or anything in between and the head stuff gets thrown about. We take our time reorganizing the stuff, and many times new organization patterns emerge. Maybe new ideas that were buried underneath come to the surface. So in this way, transition is actually something that my mind needs in order to be creative. I suppose we can try to re-create the same order we had before, but what's the fun in that? Admittedly, it takes a lot of courage and effort (and TIME) to organize the stuff differently...

Seems to me that time is the essential ingredient here. And, the time needed seems to be related to the magnitude of the event (duh). If there's time to be rested, there's a better chance of courage to allow patterns to change. If there's time to think, I'm more likely to allow some room for the stuff in the head to shift around if it needs to. Unfortunately, the pace of life these modern days doesn't really allow for a lot of time...and I know there have been transitions where by simple equation of facts of life I was forced to put all of the stuff that got tossed about into black trash bags and dump them (no time to process any of it). Usually the head stuff comes back to haunt, though, if it doesn't get processed, kind of like the great heap of trash that floats around the Pacific Ocean...  

This time of year - after the U is out, before summer is really here - I think a lot about transitions, and how insane they sometimes are. Small transitions (like getting two four-year olds to leave the house in a timely fashion) and big transitions (like having your 92-year old grandmother transition from living alone and being self-sufficient to the extent of walking to the grocery store daily to her moving to an assisted living facility...) are kind of the same and so not the same. In my ninth year of being on faculty I'm still kind of not used to/happy with the process of transitioning - and trying to trick my mind into a different process is interesting.

First of all, let me say that this is definitely not a complaint. I recognize that I would have a hard time in the regular schedule of 9 to 5 through the year with the exception of vacation time. I like being self-directed and at times free to attend to my creative projects - even if it means that several months out of a year I work 24/7. It's the transition from being 110% structured on a schedule to being 80% not on a schedule and free to decide what to do next that I want to change. In the end the total sum of "work" is probably close to the same, it just doesn't have the same set of parameters. And by "work", I mean being a full-time contributing faculty member September-May (teaching, meetings, planning, running the program, that kind of stuff. A little cello playing) and being a full-time creative artist June-August. (as a side note, I know a lot of my colleagues manage to be creative artists during the semester as well, and I hope that next year when the twins go to regular school, I can carry over a little bit of that stuff). I suppose if I was to use language that artists often hear, it's the transition from "real work" to "creative work", the implication being that since there are no hours and at times no tangible evidence of "work" since a lot of it happens in the head, creative work is not real work. 

There's a lot of talk about creativity these days, and about how we should/need to/do apply creativity to every day life - so that it is not just something artists do, but engineers and lawyers too. But  I think there are different kinds of creativity - and certainly, different creative processes. The obvious one here is structure versus no structure, a lot of rules (or parameters) versus few rules (parameters). I think it would be interesting to compare the differences in the processes from one to the other. I deal with this in a very fundamental ways when I move between classical chamber music (very highly structured, a lot of subtle yet important rules that differ between styles - and, since the music has been written by a composer at some other time, more of a re-creative process), structured improvisation (like jazz -- a lot of rules but more choice as to how to apply them) and free improvisation (it's free so there's no rules - except the rules that apply to all good music...which are many). I think analyzing these transitions and processes will help me in the other transitions in my life, so I am planning to write a series of blog posts trying to do that - live-blogging the transition from an academic to an artist!