Well, you never think that something that at the time seems extreme can surpass itself, and when it does how to describe the experience─surprise or shock? Numbness? I can’t say.

I guess as long as I’ve been doing the work, June has always been a crunch. But I didn’t know when I started that each June would best the last, or that the start of the deluge would begin earlier and earlier, overwhelming any vicissitudes in workload in the months leading up to June. Such that, since the end of November, I’ve hardly had a break and this break is the first one since then. Even now, to get here I had to tear myself away from a pile of work and its attendant stakeholders, calling me as I fled and while I was still within range of cell service. I’m safely out of reach now, and all must e-mail the void until I return. I loathe the return.

This time more than ever before, I feel how far the distance from things loved. I forgot how to go away, and forgot many things I do that are akin to me and rarely travel without. At this moment, as I begin to remember, I have to reconstruct or do without, making notes about something important that I want to remember to do when I return.

I want to make someone responsible and hate them for doing this to me, but then I put it back to myself to see how I might get control of the situation. For example, do I really have the power, besides just quitting, to change the way my job is going? (Is quitting the only option? That seems the second-weakest decision, with the weakest being to allow things to continue the way they are.)

On the way here, I thought about all of the people who now report to me, and thought in particular about the newest member of the group and all the training yet to occur. I thought about how I still need to warn her about what it might be like working with me. And I thought about how, when people report to you, they never tell you what sucks about working with you. They stay silent and your blind spots stay safely black and you never have an opportunity to find out how you can help them feel more efficacious in their jobs. Thus, I will have to guess. And I thought about my little speech about that, about how I will tell her that part of my role is to remove obstacles that prevent her from doing her job well and to help make her work life a worthwhile endeavor. Then I realized that no one ever says that to me. And the few times that I’ve been rewarded for this work, I later found out the reward was not for me but to keep me working. She said, I was afraid you’d quit if it was too hard.

It’s been a long time since the reward and that confession.

Outside, the surf is tumultuous and timeless and essential to our sense of transience. I’m here four more days.