It's interesting. That "together" notion really isn't. In actuality, life is very much compartmentalized into different roles and sometimes personas. (I don't think my particular persona changes too much).
Each role has different objectives, relationships. One flees from one area to another, lingering in those islands of competency.
Posted by weez at January 12, 2004 07:57 AM | TrackBackI remember having a conversation with a dear friend at a conference two or three years ago, in which I talked about how successfully I'd managed to compartmentalize my life, balancing various responsibilities and demands and needs. I felt as though I was doing a pretty good job of keeping all my balls in the air--mother, wife, daughter, friend, teacher, researcher, colleague, self.
He said, non-judgmentally, that he'd been very successful at compartmentalizing for a long time, but that one result of the therapy he'd been in was that he was moving toward better integrating the disparate aspects of his life and his personality.
At the time, I didn't really see any advantage to the integration he talked about. Now, in reading your post, I find myself on the other side of that same discussion. Odd how things shift...
Posted by: Liz at January 12, 2004 08:39 AMI used to feel very much that my teaching was a performance, that I had to adopt a very different persona when I walked into the classroom. After awhile, this felt uncomfortable. At some point I consciously worked on making the person I was inside the classroom more like the person I was outside of the classroom. I've been fairly successful.
But in general, I feel a lot of resonance with what you've written.
Posted by: George at January 12, 2004 08:55 AMI don't get it... "together" doesn't mean fusion or blending into one... doesn't having it together mean being able to match the appropriate behaviour to the appropriate context? keeping it together is more like having it together than being it .... this is beginning to read like a re-run of the "interesting" entry posted under the rubric "JUST A MOMENT" (aside - interesting how the styling renders the titles to blog entries all in caps)
http://weez.oyzon.com/archives/000245.html
Is it not the case that keeping it together depends on some split attention (what was and what will be as well as what is) and that depending upon whether one is judging the superlative performance of the moment or the split attention that a superlative performance of the moment requires one is more or less left with the impression of a split of consciousness or a fine focalization of consciousness on a point of now.... know when to create a mess and when to clean up ... ain't that a lesson in graphic design and living? :)
Posted by: Francois Lachance at January 12, 2004 09:22 AMWeez.....
Very interesting the number of entries that have the word "interesting" cropping up....
http://www.oyzon.com/cgi-bin/BlogEdit/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&search=interesting
And equally interesting that the term "disinterest" to date crops up in fewer entries:
It is not un-uninteresting that "disinterest" is here situated as an antonym to "interest"...
quote>
What blogs do, at the beginning, is ellicit either interest or disinterest. After that, if one becomes a regular reader, the writer's disclosures provide a sense of the person - the character. Then you decide whether or not you like the writer as a human being - en todo.
<quote
http://weez.oyzon.com/archives/000131.html
so I wonder can we introduce:
together
un-together
dis-together