Breaking Patterns

The last few days, I have been working a job that is fairly all-consuming, both in hours and in brain-space. While I have rarely in my twenty-something year career worked out of town, I have to imagine that this is like working out of town, in a foreign country, in a different time zone. Funny thing is, I am working right across town.
  

When I worked in soaps, I used to say that I my success at what I did was largely dependent upon my ability to separate work from home. At work, I thought about work, and I made the leap that my husband and caregiver would handle home, even when production ran until all hours. I didn't even attempt to micromanage one place from the other, and I couldn't see how people did that and remained successful in either place. There was a pattern of sorts to my life, and most of the time, it worked.
 
These past few days have been almost like a return to those long production day days. The difference is that somewhere along the way, the lines between work and home got blurred. Perhaps it is a question of older children, older children issues. Perhaps it is one too many days of job-hunting from home while also being in charge of meeting buses and going on field trips and taking kids to classes. It is less easy to separate home from work, less easy to know that home will survive while work goes on in that "foreign country" across town. Somewhere along the way, the pattern was broken, and it is not simple to recreate it.

The funny thing about patterns is that, even when we don't realize it, they control our lives. Even when we think we live in chaos, it is a chaos within patterns and structures we have set up. Even if we are creating new things every day, we are often doing so within a world of patterns that we know. The patterns help us know where to go and underlie what we need to do. And it's often not until the patterns are broken or changed that we remember that they were there in the first place.
 
Patterns can change, perhaps more quickly than they once did. The challenge, then, is working within patterns, but working on having them bend rather than break, so that when changes occur, we too can bend to handle them.
 
Even as I write, the pattern is changing again. Production jobs change constantly, and the patterns that go with them have to change too. The best we can do, then, for our patterns and for ourselves, is to bend--just without breaking.