Exhaustion

Every so often I come across an old picture which amuses/amazes/intrigues me.  Tonight I was searching around on my computer for a Powerpoint on preparing annotated bibliographies and, as one would expect when faced with the tedium of discussing annotated bibliographies, I became easily distracted and wandered into one of my picture folders.  Here's one from my trip to China a few years ago, which was right in the middle of an epic seven week seven country trip.  I think the picture was taken somewhere in western China, although I'm not certainly exactly where.  What strikes me about the picture of how absolutely exhausted I look, and how I feel much the same way right now.  Some of my current exhaustion relates to the manic travel I've been doing lately - as we discussed earlier, I ended up travelling around 7/8 of the way around the globe in around a week. Having said that, travel is a funny thing.  In today's world we complain about how tiring the thirty hour trip from Canberra, Australia to Burlington, Vermont is, while losing sight of the fact that it's going to the opposite side of the planet in a little more than a day.  Imagine how long that trip would have been a hundred years ago.  That said, I am exhausted at the moment, both physically and spiritually.  For the second straight semester I have an overload, although that is tiring in a good way - I do love to teach, and it feels great to be back in the classroom full-time and not fighting the endless battles of running the Global Modules program.  I think I'm so exhausted now because I'm just tired of waiting for my life to begin.  I tore up my life a few years ago - and caused some real pain to people I care about a lot - with the goal of finally finding some peace and happiness.  Truthfully, I feel that I'm on the right path and I think that the next few months will bring me where I need to be - just wish I were there already.  However, just as with travel, I guess it's all perspective.  It wasn't that long ago that I was pretty miserable with seemingly no hope of anything better - and wallowing in the unhappiness that I probably so richly deserved - and now I'm in a really great relationship, and that's what I try and focus on.  As Marcus Aurelius reminds us, life is only what we deem it to be.

I think if you go far enough down the itinerary  you get to Happy.  The key is to keep travelling.