When Virtual and Reality Collide
A familiar pattern begins to form toward semester’s end. Papers go into final phases, students sense a start of wrapping things up. Schedules tighten as we ensure we’ve crossed the T’s and dotted the I’s. Stress runs high.
Then suddenly, the plumbing goes, the car breaks down, and every unplanned family event one can imagine rears its inconvenient head. There’s a wrench in the works of our carefully laid plans. Course work, at a time when it should be front and center, is relegated to the rear, supplanted by small emergencies and events.
Toward spring semester’s end, my course work competes with holidays, gardening deadlines, graduations, religious events, and my desire to spend time with my aging parents and see to some of their needs. Because my master’s is in a family field, it is too much an irony to ignore family to study for this family degree. Still, in a weird, mutually dependent way, what I learn for the degree helps manage family needs.
As adults, our daily lives are a living result of the foundations we’ve built over the years with families, jobs, friends and household duties. We may even have volunteer work thrown in. Those entail rotes, responsibilities and traditions, things that always culminate at semester’s end, in May or December. We plan so that those times are cleared on our calendar, which works fine until the small emergencies crop up.
Meanwhile, distance education can lull you with a sense of enough time for life and school. By taking care of immediate issues during the day, you think you can always do your course work late at night or on off-times. But that’s a fallacy. Non-traditional students usually are older. After putting out daily fires, we are tired. Rather than read those gripping academic articles or fine-tune our term-paper prose, at night, we want to fall asleep. It is easy to put off the inevitable.
Is there a solution? I’m still looking. It seems that my personal reality is this: Regarding my multifaceted life, once delegation and saying no have been exhausted as options, I push on through. I knock down my responsibilities one by one, knowing it will end. At some point, I’ve learned that I really will look back and be able to say, usually with some surprise, “Hey, I did it, and it’s not too bad.” Maybe that will be my legacy, if I have one.