Burn drop: TASK AVOIDANCE or what?

The Effigy burns. (photo by Roger Easley)

One of the things I do for fun in my retirement is to attend regional burns, i.e., Burning Man-style events that don't involve surviving in a desert for a week. I often refer to it as "camping with the hippies." My first burn was in 2014, and by my fourth I was in charge of designing the entire thing.  Some have greatness thrust upon 'em and all that.

Technically my job is Placement Lead, drawing the map of where the theme camps go based on their requests, but someone has to decide where the roads go and the Effigy is and All The Things. Because we've been on new land for the last three burns, that someone has been me.  I've enjoyed the process, but I am sincerely hoping this last move is permanent.

Our burns here in Georgia (Alchemy and Euphoria) run from Thursday through Sunday-ish/Monday, but for leadership the involvement onsite is longer.  In any case, for leadership or basic attendees, the experience is intense.

So when we get home and clean all our equipment and stow it away, most of us suffer from what we call "burn drop": a refractory period where our capability for stimulation/motivation is relatively nil.

I bring this up not to excuse the fact that I have done no work on the ballet last week, but to give it as an example of something I've called the "turning of the tide" for years.  After you've completed a major project, you may find yourself surprisingly sluggish to move on to the next thing.

This is not laziness.  It is literally a refractory period, where our psyches have to process the first stimulus (finishing the ballet, closing a show, staging a successful burn) and return to a "normal" state before being able to engage with a second stimulus.  You have to let your mind disentangle itself from the psychic structures it built to deal with the first thing before it can start to seriously build new structures.

(Back when I was working at the Georgia Governor's Honors Program during the summers, my lovely first wife would often go visit her parents out of state when I got home, because in her words I was not worth being around until I "got over it."  She was not wrong.)

It's been a week now since I got back from Alchemy 2017, and I'm now ready to start work on the next things: the ballet; Peter & the Starcatcher (auditioning in January); and Unsilent Night, coming soon to your hometown on December 1, if your hometown is Newnan, GA.

—————

Feel free to leave comments on this or any other post!