Where in the world am I today?: North Vancouver, BC, Canada
Love the image I found to go along with the post today… It’s an image of an old decompression chamber that was used to help deep sea divers… Come up too quickly and divers would suffer from decompression sickness which in serious cases could be lethal.
In my case there’s no risk of death, but I always find that after an intense period of gigging I need to take some time to decompress and adjust to regular life… February ended up being a huge month for me with nineteen out of twenty eight days spent performing, add into that the time I spent traveling to and from India and the total goes up to twenty five out of twenty eight days. That’s a lot! And really if you look at the prep for gigs my brain and body were occupied for the full month.
Especially during the last two weeks of the month while I was home and working the Robson Square project during the Olympics I seemed to let an enormous amount of crap pile up on my desk. Stuff that really did need my attention, but not nearly as much as the focus I needed to give to the daily shows I was doing and the simple act of successfully living through each day.
The result of letting things collect in Piles on my desk was that when I got to the end of the run during the Olympics and along with everyone else in Canada erupted with excitement when the Canadian Men’s Hockey Team won the Gold Medal Match on the 28th to close out The Winter Games I needed a few days just to sift through the piles and make some head way on the stuff that had accumulated.
Normally if I’ve been away doing a cruise ship job, this decompression process takes about two days. After about forty-eight hours I’ve successfully managed to tidy up from what ever trip I was on and get back into the swing of things at home. This time around it’s taking longer… I think this is in part due to the fact that I was both performing in as well as helping organize the BC Street Jam program so I had admin work to do for not only myself, but the program as well. Then there’s likely the reality that I didn’t really have a chance to decompress from the trip to India before I jumped straight into the gig during the Olympics. Add to this the relationship I’m building with a guy who’s taking on some managerial duties for me and getting both of us up to speed with each other’s systems etc… Simply put there’s been more to deal with and it’s taking longer to sift through it all.
I’m not complaining mind you as these are all things that I brought upon myself and I do have the sense that all the work will pay off in the long run, but when you’re in the middle of it all and feeling rather exhausted it’s sometimes better to get a good nights rest than it is to panic too much about the state of one’s desk.
It’s been a good week of organizing and prioritizing though and I feel like I am making pretty decent headway when it comes to clearing off the desk and de-cluttering my brain. One of the biggest tell tail signs for me ends up being the state of my email in-box. I tend to use my email in-box as a to-do list as often messages will come in that I want to keep floating around because they require some additional action. Four days post Olympic Closing ceremonies and I’m just now starting to feel like I’m getting a handle on things… The in-box is down to 25 messages, but considering early in the week was up well over 50 I think I’m doing reasonably well… Hopefully by the end of the day I’ll have it down under fifteen…
Not quite at the surface yet, but hopefully the slow decompression process will help me avoid getting the bends.
