Avalanche.

“Love me when I least deserve it, because that's when I really need it.”

~Swedish Proverb



The caption to this picture might be:

Work can be such a bear. A huge bear biting your head off.

The load has fallen and is rushing toward you at increasing speed. The roar is thunderous, but sneaky. Sometimes you can hear it coming before you ever see it, and still not have any chance of getting out of the way. Other times you never know it is there until its too late. The sun disappears, the oxygen thins and you count the moments one by one.

Work overload. Followed quickly by burn-out.

Everything happens for a reason. Even work overload. The situation is usually easier to accept and understand once you are beyond the "thing" that must occur... that's a cryptic way to look at life, but its true. When you are going through hell, keep going.

Hindsight is good medicine, and the foresight to know that the hindsight is waiting is called wisdom. It can be enough to get you through at times. But like the cup I just poured hot tea in, the theory starts soundly enough, and sturdy enough, but in time the leak begins and the integrity starts to fail. The ability to remember that there is a good reason for the approach to burn-out is difficult at best. The ability to keep the faith that all of this adds up to something is at times heroic. Other times impossible.

I feel ultimately responsible for the amount of work I have to do. I have probably not used my time as well as I should have, and I vividly remember hiding from a couple of the things I am charged with doing. Such as approximately 650 gene expression assays. Okay, its actually 672.

But who is counting.