It’s over, the big conference I organise. All done and dusted for another eighteen months. It’s a strange thing, in a professional life, working towards something big that, once over, is really over. Sure, there’s a bit of cleaning up, revising the procedures manual, collating the evaluation forms and writing down what you’ll do better next time, but that’s all done without a looming, utterly inflexible deadline.
I have a week off – time in lieu, and I wander my house feeling a combination of relief, elation and flatness. I’m not sure what to do with myself. I miss my colleagues. I feel a bit lost not working alongside them from seven in the morning till ten at night. All I want to do is sleep, but I continue to wake at two am, writing lists in my head, worrying about things I’ve forgotten.
The first day after the conference, I want to be busy. I want to clean the house, cook (almost unheard of for me) get stuck back into my neglected writing, walk the dog more than she really needs. I force myself to nap after lunch, to read a novel, to sit around. I have to get off the treadmill.
By day two, I’m starting to enjoy this immense luxury of time, which reminds me of how I used to feel after a big swag of exams.
Exams tend to finish as the weather began to get warmer. This conference finishes in spring – as the world is waking up after winter. I am waking up too – emerging from a tunnel of exhaustion and preoccupation.
I haven’t been home in daylight for a couple of weeks and see that the birch trees in my garden are newly decked out in baby leaves, that the vines covering our back verandah are in bud. Everything is a fresh, clean, pale green. The creamy wisteria blossoms on the side pergola look so abundant and heavy I wonder the old timber can hold them up.
I know from experience that given another couple of weeks, my time will mysteriously fill again, that I will once more feel busy and rushed. Right now, though, I feel like a little kid waking up on the first day of the long holidays. Once I get over the panic of no longer having thoughts and tasks filling every waking second, and interrupting my dreams, I feel this great spacious sea of time – to write, to read, to take slow walks, to catch up with my family and friends.
It’s worth the craziness, just to emerge on the other side, blinking in spring sunlight, dazed and weary, satisfied and newly sane.