I woke up this morning feeling completely unmotivated. I’ve got three requirements meetings scheduled for this afternoon. I’ve run 13 of these meetings over the last couple of weeks, with 9 scheduled this week. And three of them are today. I think part of the lack of motivation comes from working ceaselessly for the last 4 months. Normally, by this point in the year, we’d have driven down to Florida for spring break, at which time I would have taken a couple of days off. We may have headed up to New York or out to West Virginia for a weekend family getaway. None of that has happened, of course. The days run together, and the motivation well runs dry without some mental downtime to rejuvenate it.
I’ve often wondered if major league baseball players ever get that feeling. You know, you’re two thirds of the way through the season, there’s still 50 games to play, the team is in the cellar, and you wake up knowing that you’re starting at second base, batting cleanup, far from home, and just feeling like you can’t stay another night in a hotel, can’t bring yourself to swing at another pitch in batting practice. Of course, these are professionals, and are paid to play, so they muscle through somehow. But even those players who are living their dream and love to play ball must have days like this now and then, right?
Baseball is on my mind because it isn’t anywhere else, and I miss it more than I realized. My year is divided into two parts: baseball season, and winter. Baseball provides mental balance for me. The often disturbing news in the morning papers is balanced by the box scores, and sports columns. That’s missing from the papers now and so one place I go each day for a little rejuvenation is gone. Maybe baseball will find a way of coming back this season, but it won’t be quite the same.
These are all small considerations in the face of the larger Pandemic (are we capitalizing this yet?). After all, what is baseball when people are getting sick, people are dying, people are out of work, people are suffering. Maybe it is familiarity during a time of uncertainty that I find comforting. The unknowns pull the levers of anxiety. Because of this, I have to limit myself to thinking about today and not worrying too much about what may happen tomorrow. When I start to think about tomorrow, or the next week, I find that my motivation is sapped just a little bit more.
The show must go on, and so when my first meeting starts early this afternoon, I’ll be ready to go, regardless if the motivation is there or not. I could take a day off at some point, but it seems wasteful to take a day off when all I’ll do is sit at home. Besides, even if I took a day off work, I can’t take a day off from helping the kids get their school work organized, checking their work, answering their questions. If I am doing that, I might as well be getting some work done, too.
Interestingly, my motivation to write has been growing lately and my appetite for reading is as insatiable as ever. This morning I completed my sixth book in six days. It was Frank Deford’s memoir, Over Time. It was, perhaps, the best book I’ve read this year, a complete surprise, and one of those books that I read with absolute delight and dread. The dread came from the certainty that the book would end, and all I wanted was for Deford (who narrates the audiobook version) to keep spinning his tales, making me laugh out loud over and over again. If I ever doubted the value of a book to lift my spirits in troubled times, Deford wiped away those doubts with each delicious anecdote.
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