Flow State

Right now, I am getting paid to do absolutely nothing.

Seriously. If you walked into my classroom today, you’d find me sitting at my desk, watching TV, messing around with video games, noodling on a bass guitar, and texting friends. Occasionally, I leave the building to go for an hour-long run or a bike ride.

The reason for this sudden, tax-funded retirement preview? I teach high school seniors. They graduated a week ago. Across all eight periods of the school day, my remaining roster totals exactly three students. Two are in one class, one is in another, and both of those periods are completely wrapped up by 10:50 a.m. After that, my classroom is a ghost town, and I am a highly compensated piece of furniture. Heck, most days, two of those three students wander to their girlfriends’ classroom, and I have nobody.

I can’t even pretend to be productive and plan for next year. Thanks to the perpetual bureaucratic mystery of public education, there is a solid 35% chance I’ll get laid off, and zero indication of which classes I’d actually be teaching if I stay. Unit planning is impossible. So, I sit.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s awesome. I will take a free paycheck any day of the week, and I’m not crying into my coffee about it. But even after eight years in a classroom, this forced confinement highlights the one thing about employment I still absolutely loathe: the schedule.

Before I became a teacher, I spent fourteen years running my own law firm. I was the boss, the employee, and the scheduler. If I had court, I would go to court. If I had a client meeting, I would go to the office. But if I had a mountain of police reports, financial records, or audio wiretaps to review? I could do that anywhere. I could sit in a coffee shop, at my desk, or out on the back deck at home. If I wanted to look at discovery from noon to 2:00 p.m., I did. If I wanted to use those hours to go for a long ride or run errands, I did that instead and read the files at midnight.

It was the TiVo life. I could pause the grind, live my life when I wanted to live it, and catch up on the work on my own timeline.

Granted, the TiVo life had its reruns. There were plenty of times it completely stunk – like getting a call on my birthday at 10:00 p.m. and spending until 3:00 a.m. in a bleak police station because a client just got busted, again!. But the flip side was priceless. I was able to pick up my kids from school most days and just sit there watching them play on the playground, completely untethered from a timecard.

Now? I’m trapped by the bell. I have a million things I want to do, but they all have to be crammed into a strict, narrow window between the time I get home and the time I go to bed, or punted to the weekend.

With summer break looming, that craving for autonomy is screaming. I’m counting down the days until I can once again do what I want, when I want, or at least choose the damn order I do them in.

Lately, the daydreaming has taken a specific turn. I find myself thinking about walking away from teaching and dipping my toes back into the legal waters. Nothing crazy. Just taking on a few court-appointed federal criminal cases. Go to court when required, take the massive boxes of FBI or DEA discovery, and review them wherever the hell I feel like sitting. Meet the client on a mutual schedule. Control the time.

The older I get, the more poignant that becomes. The clock is ticking, and I’m literally running out of time.

So as much as I’m enjoying the absurdity of getting a paycheck to watch TV and play video games this week, the novelty wears off fast. I’d rather be traveling. I’d rather be hiking, paddle boarding, or doing something as mundane as cleaning out a junk drawer or organizing a closet at home. I want to get things done on my own terms, rather than just burning daylight in an empty classroom.

Even if the thing I’m getting done is just sipping a hot cup of coffee out in the woods, on my own watch.