On The Edge

There's a curious state I sometimes enter into when I find myself especially busy at work. It's difficult to characterize precisely, but I tend to think of it as being 'hyper'. A sort of frantic sense of permanent rushing takes upon itself a curious aura of a kind of grace - things get done almost by accident, usually being remembered just in time, and a delusional feeling of confidence settles upon one, a sort of certainty that it'll all work out in the end, despite the more than reasonable possibility that it might not. The longest time such a state lasts is around a week, roughly the period of real intensity around a production. And this is the time that I'm most familiar with said state, though I have been known to enter into it on other occasions.

It is intoxicating, probably addictive and, obviously, damaging to the soul.

Yesterday I was reminded of another odd feature of being 'hyper' - which I had, at that point, been for a distinct three days. Punctuating the frantic rush come clearly defined periods of downtime, when, abruptly, everything switches off. On Friday I hit one of these at congregational prayers: no point in thinking any more of everything that needed to be done and wonderfully impossible to do anything, talk to anyone, check anything. No choice except just to be, and worship. The challenge in these periods is to stay awake since the impulse to doze is overwhelming. In fact impulse is quite the wrong word; the luxuriant passivity has nothing remotely active about it. I just about pulled through on Friday, but it was a delightfully close run thing.