To be busy is to live

With no teaching schedule and shrinking office assignments, January should have been a heaven for me. No need to rush to the train station to get to Depok during office-closing hours and no need to think up a teaching plan while still jostling with works from my boss. Clients' orders were diminishing in the first two months of the year as commonly happening to business consultants in Indonesia whose major clients are government companies (BUMNs). It should have been a moment of pleasure ... if only I didn't have my thesis to ponder.

As some of you have already known, I had worked on my thesis since early last year and it had become an unfinished business for me. I think everybody agrees, having unfinished business will make our life miserable. We can't and won't stop thinking about it, anytime, anywhere. It wears our mind and our mental state, and may enventually lead to physical exhaustion. For women, it either will make us eat more or the other way around. For dead people, their restless soul will wander and haunt, so some people said (which I don't buy).

Such things happened to me so it was such an immense sense of relief when I was finally through with my thesis. I felt like celebrating it, like having a vacation or doing nothing for a change. Yet it was just too good to be true. It was already near the end of January when I was done with my study and assignments from my boss started to pour in.

The assignments were not the big, mind-boggling, forehead-wrinkling kind, yet. I just needed to make confirmation calls, surf the Internet to get source materials, draft proposals, attend classes and perform as a mentor, and make confirmation calls. Not much but may take time, quite long time which made me unable to get a brief break for myself.

The positive side is perhaps I'd get to go home smiling a bit wider when I walk home after receiving my monthly pay, next month. Still, there are things all the money in the world can't buy, and time is one of them. In days like this, I wish I could go back to my years as a student, the time when I could easily skip a class to join the rally to bring down the president.

But hey, no use crying over spilled milk. Let's just walk on and look out to see whether tomorrow brings a better state to me, to you, to us.

The sun'll come out

Tomorrow

Bet you by a dollar that tomorrow

There'll be sun

Just thinking about

Tomorrow

Clears away the cobweb and the sorrow

'Till there's none

("Tomorrow" from the movie Annie: The New Musical)