One great thing about riding in a car is that it helps me to think, whether I’m driving or just a passenger. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that it helps me think the right amount, since I’m always thinking and usually thinking too much. There’s something about coasting along a mostly uniform but occasionally varying slip of road that helps order my thoughts and reduce them to a more manageable flow. And when you have a person riding with you who’s good to talk to — then you’re really in luck!

We drove out to Ohio with the kids last week, and returned home today. For at least a portion of the out-route and the return J was sitting in the front seat with me, which was a rare treat. It almost felt as if we were two civilized adults enjoying a road trip. This morning, we were motoring along and I fell to musing, as I often do, about why I have the relationship to work that I do. Near as I can tell, I am a relatively competent worker, but I’ve never been passionate about a job and have usually felt some desire to do the work assigned to me well, but little desire to seek out additional work, or to go above and beyond the call of duty. This is somewhat strange, because I think I’m a pretty passionate person in life. I certainly don’t think of myself as a do-the-bare-minimum kind of guy. I would like to be more passionate about work, but I’m not, and I have the sense now, as I approach forty, that work will never be a source of real meaning and satisfaction for me. A consequence of this, I think, is also that perhaps I’ll never have real responsibility in work, and will never make much of a contribution through my work, which is unfortunate given how much time it takes up.

This morning, I was specifically bemoaning a very specific thing to J, which is that I have no desire to check my work email on evenings and weekends. In fact, I have a positive allergy to this, and if I have occasion to open my work laptop on a weekend day I will hastily close out Outlook to make sure that the offending sight of my inbox burns my eyes as little as possible. I know that other people do not necessarily feel this way, that there are people who quite happily check their email and jump on work calls when they are walking their kids around the park or off on vacation. My reflection on email-checking, in fact, was prompted by watching my brother-in-law desultorily check his email on Saturday morning as we sat around the living room and relaxed. This is emphatically not me. I try to maintain a hermetic seal between my work life and my off-duty hours, and for me this is a symptom of my minimally committed approach to work. So I was telling J that I thought I’d never be much good at work, in part because I’m not the kind of person who checks email on weekends.

J, who is very smart, responded: “It’s silly to be upset with yourself for not wanting what other people want. You should just try to do your job well when you do it.”

And that so was a brazier of light kindled upon the mountain. This is great advice. It is true that I am not the kind of person who checks email on the weekend, and it is possibly true that I’d be a more effective and engaged employee if I did. (It’s also possible that the organized approach I have to work, which includes not checking email outside work hours, helps me do better work. Hard to say.) But it is also true that there are a lot of other ways I could be a better and more engaged employee without changing my fundamental approach to work-life balance and separation. Of these, the most important is that I could be present for my whole work day, and try to use my brain to think more critically about the work that I do and the work conversations that I have. This is feasible and would involve starting from where I am. And who knows, after some years of this, where I might be? It is easy to think that there are big-picture solutions to the big-picture problems of life, but it’s also possible to approach these problems just by trying to improve what you’re already doing. Too often, I imagine a much better version of myself that I could be, and then get upset with myself for not being that person. This hasn’t been terribly productive so far in spurring personal change. Maybe it would be worthwhile instead to try to work with the person I am.

Caffeine/Alcohol Update: 13 days down, 352 days to go. There was a difficult day this week, when I was feeling generally crummy, probably because I had eaten too much heavy and spicy food, as I always do when I’m home. I felt tired and achy and my head hurt. And my thought was: If I’m going to feel bad anyway, why not have a drink? And that seemed a compelling argument. But then I thought, well, if I do that, I’ll be back where I started, and that wasn’t where I wanted to be. Maybe this will help, maybe it will not, but a one-year experiment in abstention is worth trying, just to see where it leaves me. And so I abstained.