My head is full of new experiences.

Rowing a boat for miles and miles under the hot sun. Sleeping under the stars. Eating fresh lettuce from the garden. Tying a double half hitch knot. Visiting towns I’ve never explored.

Strangely, I’m finding that I have less to write about these days, not more. I have little to say about the new places I’m going, new people I’m meeting, and new stuff I’m doing. Any new ideas are slowly warming in the rice cooker of my mind, inaccessible for now.

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I enjoy sailing. There’s nothing better than being out on the water on a sunny day, cruising along with the warm breeze on your face, removed from the cares of life on land, enjoying a new perspective.

However, sometimes it’s not like that at all. The wind might be bitterly cold. Or there’s so much fog you can’t see anything. Or the water’s so choppy you get unpleasantly damp. Or you get rope burns. Or the wind suddenly dies, and you’re forced to row home.

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One thing I’ve learned in this pandemic is that time is not my obstacle when it comes to getting things done. It’s energy.

It wasn’t hard to figure this out in the painful hours sitting at my computer, desperately trying to stay awake even after a full night’s sleep. I just didn’t have much of anything to work with, and no way that I knew of to fully make it better. I was like an old battery that couldn’t hold a charge for long.

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Years ago, I was teaching music lessons six days a week and managing my music school on top of that.

I like to be busy, but I was starting to get tired. To my surprise, the thing I was getting tired of was not the bookkeeping and appointment setting and other mundane tasks. It was teaching the music lessons.

I found myself with less patience and more resignation. The energy I usually put into problem-solving, digging deep and going beyond the minimum to find just the right approach for a given student — it just wasn’t there.

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Over the next few weeks, most American children will return to some kind of school.

For many, there will be a return to the misery of this past spring, when solitary worksheets replaced meaningful connection and challenge.

For others, however, misery has always been endemic to the school experience, pandemic or no. An assignment isn’t going to get done unless mom or dad are sitting there, managing the process like they’re trying to pull a pickup truck out of a ditch (with all of the exertion and feelings of frustration and inadequacy that implies).

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