In the email today

... yep, inspiration and advise seems to find me when I need it most. Now this has to have come via The Graces!

What work-life balance? (It's all one pond.)

Wednesday 12th May 2010

I went on a retreat a few weeks ago, and it was just the thing for recalibrating my energy, focus and enthusiasm. What is was not about was work-life balance, because I don't think that's the right paradigm for my life, and maybe not for yours, either.

For me, it's about choosing in a more flexible way, day to day, how to allocate time between the different parts of my life - client work, writing my book, working on my business, family, friends, downtime (and currently of course, Masterchef!). I used to think of it as making work-life choices, but now I've taken it a step further.

While I was on retreat, I had a chat to Venerable You, a Buddhist nun I met last year when I presented a couple of workshops at the Australian Youth Buddhist Conference at Portsea. Venerable You is a most practical and also inspired teacher, a combo that appeals greatly to me. (She is also very amusing...)

We were talking about fitting meditation and reflection into a busy life, and she mentioned that she saw it all as 'just one pond'. A lightbulb moment. Just one pond. Not divvying up time between this compartment or that, finishing 'work' so you can move onto 'life'. Just one pond. For me, a window opened somewhere, bringing a sense of flexibility I hadn't had for a while.

In any moment, on any day, you can move fluidly from one area into another, and back again. You can respond as needed in any part of life. You can follow your sense of what needs to happen next, or what suits your frame of mind. So some days it's all about my book, and on others the focus is on client needs, or cooking a new risotto, or preparing for a creative thinking workshop, or going to a movie with my son or a friend. But there's no weighing it all up to find that perfect (mythical?) balance; whatever needs to happen on a given day, happens.

And if you are cultivating mindfulness, say, or patience, then you cultivate it in every part of your 'work' and your 'life', not just carve out 20 minutes for it each morning.

Just one pond. Utopian maybe, but so far, it works for me.

http://workincolour.com.au/blog/post/65/what-worklife-balance-its-all-one-pond/

It's Miles Franklin Time.

I know I will be very happy when every office runs an Archibald, Booker and Franklin sweep just for fun. All shortlistees are deserving of their place and the various artists usually have a long and distinguished pedigree like fine blood stock.

I am putting my money on The Book of Emmett by Deborah Forster (a first novel from a Melbourne writer) for the Miles Franklin, but what a field.... Castro, Hartnett, Temple, Miller and Silvey. Craig Sivey's Jasper Jones would be in my Quinella, let's see how far off I am.

So as you can see, occasionally a talented unknowns emerge from the artistic ghettos and attics (in reality warehouses and garden shed throughout suburbia). That is why I was so pleased that Glenda Guest won last weeks Commonwealth Best First Novel Prize. It is an honour for her and a recognition that our Creative Writing higher degrees do not produce second-rate writing. It is just the sort of publicity our beseiged academics, like Glenda's supervisor and mentor, Nigel Krauth needs.

ERA points(Excellence in Research Australia)may be the focus of University proficiency measures of academic compentence, yet something like this (Prestigious Awards in the Creative Arts) comes along and the various University Media Units are straight onto the major dailies, attaching their pettard to the student's achievement. Yet is the Creative Work adequately recognised under the ERA. At least some Universities do... but sadly not ALL. One in that I am particularly familiar with is totally recalcitrant on this metric and denies themselves some Federal Government fiscal reward for ignoring these outputs.

The other issue is that the sheer quality of work produced by students such as Glenda, and Janine Carey (appointed Writer In Residence at Queensland's Great Keppel Island!) Add that to her shortlisting for the Callibre Prize, and her publication in the forthcoming Australian Review of Books for that work... part of her PhD artefact).
These students work are inspiring all of us to aim higher and keep pushing through the tough times in the PhD writing journey.

These just have to be indicators of teaching merit and proficiency surely? How hard can it be to find alternative ways to measure teaching other than quantitative anonymous student questionnaires which often attach the Course content criticisms to the actual lecturer (teacher). Somehow our Higher Education system's push for Quality Frameworks is revealed as totally inadequate (as is the case I would argue, in ALL organisations).

On this thought, Mark gave me a link to humourous (yet deadly true) article from the Campus Review. It's called What's in a name? By (psydonym) Henry Barnes... the whole issue of management decision making, accountability and transparency is opened up for much warranted scrutiny.

http://www.campusreview.com.au/pages/section/article.php?s=Comment&idArticle=15508

Can we have metrics to measure management efficieny as conditional upon Quality Measures recognition and Funding? Or is that just too far out there and upsetting for too many underperformers in high poistions of authority and power?

With that last tasty morsel I will retreat back to my washing machine and well spun load, having already completed the supportive mother/taxi driver priority on the day's schedule, and then having filed (and Endnoted) all my newly searched journal articles and references. I think I will take a screen break before getting down to writing my book chapter.

Yeah sure, I hear you say!

Well, that's my honest plan... at this stage, anyway.