has severely complicated my productive life. I’m just not getting things done; I am in all honesty completely bewildered a good portion of the time right now about what I ought to be doing or what I should attend to next.
It’s not that I’m not busy—in fact, I am very busy most of the time. It’s just that it all seems to amount to nothing in thre end, to be directed toward myriad ends about which I have no particular set of priorities. Everything seems fragmentary, invariably behind schedule, essentially an afterthought, if not an after-afterthought, hassled, and distant, unreal.
I am full of fervent hope that this total unfocusing of fatherhood doesn’t represent a new normal with which I am expected to function until my child reaches adulthood. If that is the case, I suspect that I will be far less productive in the years to come than I have been in the years thus far passed.
Whereas I used to spend my days planning and executing in relation to career, degree, and hobby/interest progress, I now obsess from sunrise to sunset about reading to my child from Peter Hessler travelogues before bedtime.