Freedom,horrible horrible freedom!

It’s 1990 and I am running from the library to the English department, out of the doors, past the duck-pond, through the Faculty of Arts corridors (dodging the resident peacocks) to the English department essay drop-box where I slide into home, the essay posted through the slot and stamped at 4.58pm. The deadline for submission? 5.00pm.

It’s 1994 and 3am in the morning. I am printing out my Honours dissertation, all 70 pages of it, on a dot matrix printer that requires me to feed in each separate page. Each page takes about 5 minutes to print. And did I mention that I need to have two copies of the dissertation? But tomorrow is the last possible day that I can take it to the binders. It has to be submitted on Friday. It gets done. Just. 

Yesterday evening: I’m typing, typing, typing, bashing out words that don't even seem to make sense any more. I’ve got 3 hours until my deadline and I’m on a three-week extension as it is. Times have changed – I upload my essay to Dropbox on the university’s online learning page. I’ve never even set foot on campus – everything has been done by distance. I hit ‘send’. The final essay in my M.Ed. is gone  - disappeared into the internets. It’s over.

Now what?

I’m the type of person who prefers to be busy. Rather than the sensation of a burden lifted, the end of a project leaves me with a huge feeling of emptiness. It’s always the same – 1990, 1994, 2013. My mind immediately goes to a ‘what next?’ state. What is going to rush in to fill this vacuum?

Three cheers for blogging! It will do until the next project comes along. And there will be a project – there is always another project.

Happiness lies in imagining all the new possibilities.

(NB. 'Freedom, horrible horrible freedom!" - the reference is not mine...)