I am struggling these days to find my pace, my groove, and easy balance between work and real life. While it surprises me not at all that my schedule this fall is overwhelming, it does surprise me that I am so out of sorts with everything. Oddly enough, the only thing that is engaging me at the moment is my work, which has luck would have it, takes up most of my life anyway. My teaching schedule this fall is grueling–I begin Monday through Thursday mornings with an 8AM lesson, spend the morning in yoga class or at the piano practicing, teach several more lessons between noon and 2PM, either spend the next few hours in rehearsal or more practicing, and then begin my afternoon/evening lessons between 3:30 and 4PM. By the time I finish in the evening I am exhausted, completely extraverted-out, nearly comatose with the effort and stamina required to function on a high level for those 12-hour days.

On top of my teaching schedule, I have multiple performances this fall. All stimulating and extremely rewarding, but it does further fill my weekends and off time with needed practice and rehearsal time. We are traveling some this fall–to my brother's wedding in St. Louis at the end of the month; to Taos for a couple of days in October. We are taking most of Thanksgiving week to squeeze in a mini-vacation to San Francisco. I am in a charge of a teachers' workshop with a visiting clinician in a few weeks; Matt and I are hosting a musicale at our house that was auctioned off some time ago–we provide the entertainment and setting, others will cater food and drink. I teach performance classes three separate weekends this fall and have students in competition and recitals on several other weekends. Yesterday, my good friend Lora asked what weekends were open for her to come visit in the next few months. I haven't yet responded, but I know what the answer will be–there are no "open" weekends. I love visits from Lora, and to imagine that I can't make time for a friend to come for the weekend makes me crazy. Yet, here we are, standing at the edge of an overflowing few months.

But here's the thing: it is all this work that is most interesting to me at the moment. I am suffering from restlessness in the rest of my life, so much so that an empty afternoon or evening leaves me pacing the house, in search of something to grab my attention. Oh, it is not that there is not plenty to do: my house is in constant need of cleaning; I have books stacked up waiting for me on every available surface; I haven't really cooked anything in months, relying on Matt's skills in the kitchen and my ability to snack through most of my meals on fruit, nuts and cheese. But none of these things interest me; this restlessness runs deep, dragging me down.

There's an unrest inside me.
Oh, it's long I have had
Such an unrest inside me,
And it's getting' real bad….

….goes a favorite Marc Blitzstein cabaret song. These kinds of moods ebb and flow in my life; I've seen enough of them to know the signs. One of the triggers this time around certainly is the heat, which coupled with the unfamiliar humidity this summer has been depressing indeed. We've gone weeks without turning off the swamp cooler, which, faced with this level of humidity, hardly works anyway. Such heat leaves me with cabin fever: I know I can't be outside without risking a migraine, and so I stay inside, pacing the cage of my home.

For I wish it so!
What I wish I still don't know
But it's bound to come,
Though so long to wait….

I have seen enough of these patterns in my life even to know the way out. What I have to make myself do is exactly what I don't want to do: I have to sit down with myself and check in, take stock, make those little boring observations about my world that I don't really care about at the moment. I have to sit still long enough to remember that the climbing roses need trimming, I want to try to string a clothesline in the backyard, I need contact solution and face soap at the drugstore. I have to write down that idea for my brother's wedding present, make a note about the best way to teach Sally's new sonatina, make a practice plan for learning that trio I am playing for a recital in October. I have to sit down with the dull, ordinary, mundane details of my life and sort them out, so that in these horrible, restless minutes I don't have to wander aimlessly, blindly, unable to focus on anything long enough to keep my world turning, but rather I can turn to my written roadmap and numbly do the next thing. And the next thing. And still the next thing, until certainly, suddenly, one day, I will find myself climbing back into the life I love.

I will give my life
And my love, I know.
I've such grand aims,
With so many names,
That I grow numb;
But sure one is bound to come!
Because I wish, I wish it so.
I wish it so.