Sabbactical

This plant is growing at the top of a wall not too far away from here. The wall is about five feet tall! I am not sure where it is getting its nourishment from but it is there. Writing my thesis was beginning to feel like this plant. This blog has been more scanty of recent week. One reason for this is actually I have not been making the progress as I was before. There was very good reason for this, I was not getting the time.

Now I have cut back drastically on a lot of things in life in order to make time for thesis. I have not been going out to events, I have not seen my parents for months and I have not planned a holiday. It simply was not enough.

There are three big commitments in my life at present and in order of priority for attention these are thesis, work and church. I should explain I work 80% in a job that could easily be 100% and if I am ill the work still needs doing and the only one who can do that work is me. When I started my PhD the job actually did fit into four days a week, however two to three years ago that changed. I am working flat out and not keeping all the balls in the air. On Monday I have to go into work and explain why I have taken a nine month break from a project. Simply no time gov honest!

So with thesis not going as quickly as I liked and work being demanding, I found that the expectation that I would be getting more and more involved in church a difficult situation to negotiate. It would work like this, something quite small would be asked of me but then as I explored the ramifications the job would get bigger and bigger. Some of this was deliberate hiding of implications, some of this was my personality. If I am involved in doing something I like to see it done well. Actually it felt to me at times as if people were either plotting to find ways to get me more involved or were using me as a default person to ask to do things.

With my job I edit my thesis at weekends, I find that I can read during the week but I do not have the concentration to do editing. Editing is not easy and involves holding lots of strands together and not dropping any. If you think writing a PhD is just writing three masters thesis then you have got the wrong end of the stick. Not only do you have the practical work of three theses, you also have to integrate them together and find something new to say that runs through all three.

I suspect there is actually no shortage of new ideas in my thesis but it has felt at times as if I was trying to corral at least semi-wild horses. The result is that at this stage of my thesis I need coherent times. I can not just switch onto thesis for a hour or two in an evening and do worthwhile work. If I attend worship on a Sunday that really means sitting down at around 4pm to my thesis if at all, days like today when I was table elder take me longer to settle after church. Basically a day lost and when I have only 2.5 days anyway a day is heck of a lot to loose and to loose that regularly (one for five out of the last six is adding up and the sixth was taken with work). If you wonder why 2.5 then half a day goes with shopping and doing household chores.

Basically I got to the point where the time I had for my thesis was not allowing me to make progress.  Something had to give and the only thing that I could give that would allow the time was church. I was clearly not managing me involvement with church in a way that would enable me to finish my thesis. Seeming as the trying to keep a low level involvement going failed. I could not keep the commitment level low enough. The only other option is to opt out completely. There were people who helped me manage my commitment well, there were people who did not. Some of my keeping going so long was the loyalty to the people who were good at not pushing boundaries.

This was actually decided almost two weeks ago, but there was a communion service and only two active elders available for it, apart from me. To do communion in the style my congregation likes we need eight. Therefore dropping out at short notice seemed unfair especially as I was Table Elder 1. If you want that So I have basically just had communion to do. Today was communion and now I should not be back at church until after my thesis has been submitted, so in November.

That said I have been working on it. The big problem is that to write the introduction I am having to trace books and many are not available directly from Amazon, nor would they be in the University Library as they are far too specialist for that. So it would either be inter-library loans or me purchasing them from other dealers. That means I am writing in the expectation of having to include other work. This is tricky. So for the moment I am going to concentrate on writing a conclusion instead and hope that I can write it pretty quickly.

Hopefully next weekend I will get the 2.5 days and be able to make some good progress.