Wake in sleep

"Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep."
~ Albert Camus

I have had nearly two weeks with 2-3 hours of sleep per night on average because I have stayed up all night working or studying. I know that this period will be over in four weeks but it is starting to take its toll. I went to university after work yesterday to listen to my favourite lecturer.  I just could not keep my eye lids from gently closing, pausing for a moment and using all of my will power to reopen them. An hour later, the lecturer said to the class," you can have an early mark tonight". I felt guilty, I was trying to appear engaged but my head kept nodding and bobbing. I think he ended the lecture early because of me.

And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
~D.H. Lawrence

I had slept in this morning, to 7am and had to race to work to make an 8am interview with a person that might be joining my team. They didn’t show. I put my makeup on in the car in the parking lot. When I was younger I wore makeup to hide spots, these days it is to hide the bags under my eyes from my perpetual tiredness.

"One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community".
Albert Einstein 

I met with my manager today and told him I had been working for weeks between 7am and 3-4am getting a couple of hours sleep and powering on. I sat down and went through the 10 projects I am managing and the 30 business as ususal issues I had been dealing with. I told him that I had hired more people in my team and that I now had close to 20 direct reports.

I told him I was finding hard in the final four weeks of my course to get all of my study done and he realised that I have been working double time plus doing full-time university as well. He chastised me for studying full-time. He said, he had completed his masters part time. I said, "yeah, well you had a wife who looked after you as well".

I was proud of myself, giving him some possible structural solutions to the problem and told him that I didn’t want to study part-time and why should I compromise study, just so I could work more. As he started to go on about next year, I told him that I had been contacted by a head hunter yesterday for a role in a completely different industry, flashy job title, and a gazzilion $$$ with a US company to set up their Asia Pacific operations which would involve alot of travel initially. 

I told him that I wasn’t telling him this because I was considering leaving, or trying to leverage more money. However, it was a trigger for me to think about what I should be doing with my life.

He didn’t look concerned at all. In fact, what I noticed was that he appeared to be envious. He is a guy that values status. That was not quite the reaction I was looking for.

"The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play."
Arnold Joseph Toynbee

Tonight I went to the Belvoir Street theatre in Darlinghurst to see a very funny play called, ‘It just stopped’. During the first act, my eyelids seemed destined to droop heavily towards the earth’s core as though gravity had been amplified by some crazy magnetic force.

The second act made me think,  laugh and cry.

It reminded me of what the reader had told me on the weekend about my writing plays sometime in the future. It seemed so much more appealing that being a cog in the corporate wheel.