The Thanksgiving holiday weekend is coming to a close, and I find myself ending it much the same way I began it: sitting on the couch in front of a football game. In fact, the couch and I used the last four days to become very reacquainted with each other...and I have no regrets about that at all.
Thanksgiving is a great holiday for teachers. Oh, who am I kidding? Every holiday is great for teachers. While most of the rest of the working world trudged back to work on Friday we teachers, as we do every year, did whatever the heck we wanted to do on Black Friday. This teacher used Friday, and Thursday, and Saturday and today, to rest. Rest my body as well as my mind. Going into the weekend I had plans and to-do lists and goals....but when Thursday morning dawned I cancelled the plans and tossed the to-do's.
I wasn't completely unproductive, and I did way more than just sit in front of the TV. My house is a little bit cleaner than it was on Wednesday. Most of my hunting stuff is cleaned and packed away. The clean laundry now out-weighs the dirty laundry. My freezers are defrosted, cleaned, and organized, as is my laundry room.....well, I didn't need to defrost the laundry room. But I also did some pleasure reading. I watched a lot of football. I slept in, daily. I did NOT go to school or do any teacher stuff here at home (until about 20 minutes ago). This afternoon I even took a nap - I never take naps!
While I dozed today I kept having cognitive dissonance about my choices over the weekend. I compared my accomplishments to my goals, the accomplishments falling far short of the goals, and wondered if I'd wasted four days. My gut and heart told me "no", and they still say the same. I feel rested, mentally and physically. I feel ready to go to school tomorrow. I feel prepared to endure the holiday season. I'm as thankful now for these last four days off as I was last Wednesday when I walked out of school. Maybe more so.
Teaching is a really hard job. Life is an even harder job. Day after day of both becomes very draining, and I'm not even a real teacher anymore! I hope my teaching colleagues found a way to do what I did this weekend, take a little vacation from both. If not, why not? Why do we, teachers and others, have such a hard time stepping away from outside needs so we can concentrate on our own needs? It's frustrating, sad even, that life has become so all-consuming that we feel guilty or lazy when we choose to be unproductive with our allotted hours in a day. I'm not suggesting we all just toss aside our responsibilities and go through life as a sluggard. I AM suggesting we remind ourselves, and each other, that it's ok to step away from those responsibilities once in a while and recharge ourselves with some "me time". But maybe not for four days at a time......
And that's gonna be an abrupt end because this final football game of the weekend is just fantastic!
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