{"id":31313,"date":"2014-07-23T11:25:50","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T18:25:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stage.headlessnauedu-b6hgdzckfdgxgzhe.westus-01.azurewebsites.net\/?p=31313"},"modified":"2016-02-20T12:09:43","modified_gmt":"2016-02-20T19:09:43","slug":"driven-road-balance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/driven-road-balance\/","title":{"rendered":"Being driven on the road to balance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 by Laura Huenneke, Provost<\/em><\/p>\n

Summer can be a special time in an academic\u2019s year.\u00a0For those of us in Flagstaff, it\u2019s an opportunity to enjoy the beautiful setting and the relative serenity of campus.<\/p>\n

The season presents many with an opportunity for freedom from the regular schedule of classes, grading and meetings; even those committed to summer teaching or to projects with a deadline can enjoy the longer days and quiet campus. Many of us take this chance to invest more time in our own priorities and passions.\u00a0These can be both personal and professional, of course; ask my colleagues here in the provost\u2019s office about how many \u201csummer projects\u201d I am trying to have us tackle and complete!<\/p>\n

People in higher education often link the terms \u201cpassion\u201d and \u201cpriorities,\u201d a reflection of how fortunate many of us are to be able to pursue our interests as part of our work life.\u00a0 I\u2019ve encountered discussions of passion several times recently, from advice on crafting great presentations (\u201cTalk Like TED,\u201d by Carmine Gallo) to feedback on faculty interests.<\/p>\n

Passion is often what brings us into academia\u2014passion for one\u2019s field of inquiry, for performing, writing or creating, and for mentoring students.\u00a0Summer may allow us to re-connect to those passions. Tackling a long-delayed writing project, or immersing oneself in a new learning experience, or heading off for an intensive field investigation, can certainly be as intense and absorbing as a week during the normal semester.<\/p>\n

Of course, passion can also blind us to a lack of balance in our lives. Academic scholars can easily lose sight of work-life boundaries and be tempted into working nearly anytime, anyplace. (A research colleague of mine once boasted of working on a grant proposal while in the hospital waiting room during his son\u2019s birth; I couldn\u2019t help observing that I had personally not had the same opportunity.)<\/p>\n

I found a recent essay<\/a>\u00a0in the Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> quite moving. The author wrote of reluctantly leaving academia and discovering that her non-academic job actually allowed her to be passionate about her work while having most evenings and weekends left for other interests and priorities. We might well use summer to think about balance and how we can adequately preserve energy for our personal as well as our professional passions\u2014an essential element of human welfare over the long term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 by Laura Huenneke, Provost Summer can be a special time in an academic\u2019s year.\u00a0For those of us in Flagstaff, it\u2019s an opportunity to enjoy the beautiful setting and the relative serenity of campus. The season presents many with an opportunity for freedom from the regular schedule of classes, grading and…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":25691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[856,70,38,24,855],"class_list":["post-31313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-views-from-nau","tag-carmine-gallo","tag-laura-huenneke","tag-nau","tag-northern-arizona-university","tag-work-life-balance"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}