Work Addiction

Today is the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. Yesterday, I went with my family on our ritual New Year’s hike along one of the less-used trails on the Mt. Holyoke Range in western Massachusetts. The mosquitoes were out full-force, but we managed to find a quiet few minutes to sit by our favorite stream and meditate on the year that passed, and the year to come.

Even for a day, it’s hard to break with routine, and the pressing feeling of all the goals I should be accomplishing: writing, marketing my work, preparing my classes, grading my papers, dealing with the messy house. It’s hard not to turn on the computer and let myself be lulled by the distractions of e-mail, and blogs, and spider solitaire. But I didn’t turn on the computer yesterday, and my goal was to make myself not work, not even think about work.

It was hard. I am addicted to work. In any 15-minute block that looms before me, I think, “what can I accomplish?” Can I make headway with the junk mail on this messy table? Start another batch of pesto from the forest of basil that sits on the counter? Dice up more of the tomato harvest for salsa or sauce? Check my e-mail one more time, in hopes that there might be a message that isn’t a joke, a you-tube link, or political junk mail? Sweep dog hair off the floor?

What is it with Americans and our addiction to productivity?

Today, even though I’d intended another computer-free day, since it is the second day of Rosh Hashanah, I succumbed when my husband said he was going to try to whittle down his e-mail box. But I tried to do it mindfully. I read blogs from my live-journal children’s lit friends, and thought about how so many of us are in similar positions: super-mom writers with outside jobs, always beating ourselves up for not writing, always setting the next set of goals.

But I’m going to turn off the computer now, and walk in the woods with my dog. And later, I’m going to go bicycling with friends. Because personally, I am never going to get out of this current phase of writers’ block if I keep thinking of my next book as one more piece of work to accomplish. I’ve got to get to the point where it’s as appealing as the fall light.