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[thirty-four] minus twenty: the exhilarating sense of freedom

centaur 1

SO! I’m back at the ranch after my business trip, back home after being laid off while traveling for work, back in my office slash library where I worked remotely for much of the past two and a half years.

BUT I was surprised at the exhilarating sense of freedom when I stepped back into my library. I spent fifty years collecting these books and a decade of that organizing them into a kind of external brain, a structuring which only really worked once we had this much larger space on the East Coast, but I never fully had time to take advantage of all of this … this INFORMATION SPACE, because of the pressures of work.

Well, work hasn’t come to an end, even though I’ve been laid off, because as a researcher it’s in my best interest to continue the collaborations I had on papers in flight. But now it’s just focused on the important stuff, and the rest of my time is focused on much needed improvements. And as I stood in the library, the outcome of years of work organizing – prompted by my wife, who long since adopted “everything has a place” in her studio, and knew the effect it would have – I felt like, “I can DO this now.”

Already today, I read up on probability theory, practiced piano, debugged problems with my bass guitar, and, yes, collaborated on an ongoing paper. (I also continued to recuperate from food poisoning, worked on taxes, let the plumber in to fix the plumbing, picked the brain of the landscaper, and took care of house and cat things for my wife, who’s having migraines). And I still have hours left in my day.

Who knew getting laid off could be so liberating?

Maybe it was time.

Back to work!

-the Centaur

Pictured: My “work” workstation, and the “information space” behind it.

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