I am coming
to realize that January is often jolting.
Starting on
New Year’s Day, my attention is drawn to the inevitable tick of the
calendar. 1/365, gone. 1/52, gone.
1/12, gone! Stop, stop! It is all passing too quickly!
But this
awareness also causes me to re-evaluate how I spend my diminishing days, and
upon reflection, I realize that the choices I have made in January are good
ones. Take the decision I made, out of
desperation, to send Annie to rehab in Colorado. Or the decision to quickly abandon a visiting
professorship in another city. Or the
tipping point last January that prompted me to just “be” for six months. It is as though my mind is made up of a bunch
of balls in an obstacle course, and January gives me the temporal permission to
shake the globe and let them all settle into a new arrangement.
This
January was no exception. Two weeks ago,
I started my second term in the M Arch program at CCA. I had loved the first semester there and anticipated
the second to be equally stimulating and rewarding. [As an aside, I also discovered that I
satisfied the requirement for a course in “structures” by my three terms of
engineering mechanics, taken…44 years ago!]
Yet within the first meeting of studio 2, I began to suspect that it was not going to work
for me: the timing late in the day, the demanding expectation of a new body of
work every two days, the sterility of the instruction. I had to quickly assess whether this class
was going to be a good use of my time in terms of learning, creativity, and
joy, and I concluded it was not. Despite
its being a required class in a sequence of studios, I chose to drop it. In fact, I dropped it twice, because the Dean
had encouraged me to give it a second chance, and I did.
Now it is
Friday, early afternoon. Instead of
scrambling to have my model and drawings ready for a 3pm studio, I am
writing. I woke up to the patter of my daughter and had a conversation with her. I meditated and read.
I don’t know what impact my withdrawal will have on my future in the graduate program here at CCA. I am still loving my Design Media class, and I will probably pick up a painting class. But it is reminding me that I need to follow my own path, to sort out what is stimulating and useful, and to let go of what is not.
For now and for me, this was the right choice.
I don’t know what impact my withdrawal will have on my future in the graduate program here at CCA. I am still loving my Design Media class, and I will probably pick up a painting class. But it is reminding me that I need to follow my own path, to sort out what is stimulating and useful, and to let go of what is not.
For now and for me, this was the right choice.
