equanimity now!

A veritable flood of editorial feedback today, not all of it pretty. I'm really struggling hard to maintain equanimity, and I may be having some success. I seem to waver between moments where I feel as though this book stuff is just the most important thing in the entire world (very bad) and others where I step back a titch and recognize that none of this really matters. On the research front, I'm still waking up at 3 am in a panic about stuff that has to be done by next October (bad) but then thinking that I've already had a lot of fun with my work and don't really need to have a gigantic lab populated by millions of brilliant young students. In fact, I probably wouldn't even like it.

Behind all of this, standing beside me is this amazing woman who reminds me from time to time that I don't have to do any of this at all. I could just get out of this chair and walk away from it all, spend a few years playing with kids and then toddling back to that spot by the ocean. That's a perspective I like. She's my Valentine.

It's interesting, this divide between what we think we want and what we want. I'm doing experiments in my lab where a part of the agenda is to demonstrate that people think they want gigantic McMansions to live in, whereas the facts of science suggest that such abodes make them feel physically unwell. Now I wonder whether I'm falling prey to exactly the same kind of error myself, but not in my home so much as in the way I'm leading my life.

You'd think by the age of 50 I'd have figured out some stuff. Wouldn't you?