A 'busy pause'

 Photo by Amy Elting on Unsplash

Some days, I'm so interested in everything that I try to do as much as possible at the same time. I start drafting an abstract I want to submit for a conference at the same time as I am re-reading interview transcripts. I decide I want to go over a paper I'm working on, but that I also want to draft the methodology chapter of my thesis (perhaps prematurely). On these days, I am pulled in so many different directions that it's difficult to get anything done. 

I want to reframe this though - I think I have a tendency to beat myself up over it: 'why am I so fickle?', 'why can't I focus today?', 'why can't I just do things properly?'

So, today, I'm going to celebrate the fact that I've done all sorts of different things. I've submitted that abstract for the conference I hope to present at (that's a 'done' thing, right?). I've watched some videos from an archive that I want to visit when possible, taking screenshots of the stills that link to the stories that my interview participants have so generously shared with me. I only watched three of the videos - and I felt guilty the whole time because I was enjoying myself far too much and this is definitely not something on my 'to do' list for this week - but they were such brilliant examples of the stories that are told about places. On one newsreel, the broadcast journalist from decades ago declared that my research site is famous for "its remarkable ugliness". The cheek of it! But these are the things that we say about places. We know them as ugly or beautiful, rich or poor, rural or urban. We could argue - spontaneously, instinctively - that our understandings of places are rooted in these kinds of binaries. Perhaps 'good and bad' is mixed up in there somewhere. 

As well as this, I did the pre-reading for a research methods module I'm taking later this week. The focus is on researching with children. Up to now, the participants in this project have been adults, but I'm hoping to use some focus group interviews to explore local teenage girls' experiences of education and their hopes for the future. I want to bring these 'stories-so-far' into conversation with those I've already collected from adult women who have lived and worked locally. The pre-readings were interesting - they're from outside of the disciplines I'm working in currently (education, sociology, geography) - and they foregrounded the legal rights of children and young people in research. This has made me step back from the 'plan' I hastily put together for these focus groups whilst worrying about what I wanted to do last week. Can I give the young people more choice of how to respond to a question or task? Could I pilot my approach first and explore how well it worked? Could I involve them in thinking about some of the 'big questions' at the heart of the project - if they want to? 

It's interesting that my approach to teaching is generally collaborative and (I hope) focused on empowering my students to ask questions for themselves. Yet, amid the pressures of the PhD and balancing everything else at the moment, I seized on my first thoughts and didn't question them. Would I have given myself chance to pause if I hadn't done this reading? Possibly not. So perhaps days like today are a 'busy pause' - not a blank, mindful gap in the diary for 'reflection', but a messy tangle of different jobs and ideas that criss-cross and, just sometimes, link together in a way that moves things forward.