This [deadline] too shall pass…

I finally finished a draft of the final report for the grant project I’ve been working on all summer. I’d hoped to have it done yesterday, but didn’t quite make that deadline. As a result, this morning was a bit of the frenetic kind of writing that I hate. Even more than the frenzied pace of this mornings work, however, I dislike the vaguely anxious feelings it leaves me with for the rest of the day. Finishing something I’ve been either putting off or just working diligently on for a long time always makes me feel like there is something else I should be doing. This is why I had a defacto moratorium on talking to/engaging with people before I had read an entire work of fiction when I came home on breaks during college, and why I was horrible to be around during most of my first two years medical school (mostly because the moratorium should have continued, and didn’t). In an attempt to learn from these experiences, I’m planning to go on a long bike ride this evening and take a page from Walter’s playbook, who feels no qualms about barking at me to pet him if he does not feel sufficiently relaxed:

As an aside, I was interested in the origins of the proverb that gave the title to this post. I checked Wikipedia…