The idea of writing this particular grant proposal at this specific time clearly makes no sense in the framework of my life, with teaching and traveling and kids and a million other things to do. It would border on the insane to try to do this now and to do it well. Yet the intrinsic impossibility of writing this proposal stays with me. It was with me in the pool this morning, where all was quiet except for the sound of strokes and flip turns in the water. It is with me now. I cannot resist think through some of our latest results.
And so it begins. Before I fully realize it, I am sucked into a whirlpool of ideas. I float on them, soon lost in the absolute freedom of thinking. I am absolutely engaged.
I am fascinated with something no one understands and only a few of us would care to. I am consumed with the desire to think through this mystery, to know it. As Thoreau said, “to gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it and gnaw at it still”. It is exhilarating to be drawn into the deep realm of the undiscovered and it is a challenge to harness the wild power of scientific ideas by writing about them. I want to explain our research results clearly to my colleagues, propose a model and ask them “don’t you see it too?” My intellect is engaged and my heart too, because I love this work.
I am oblivious to the looming demands of the 100 students that I will begin teaching tomorrow, deaf to the requests of colleagues to help out on this or that, rushed with my graduate students that need my advice, and indifferent to the calls of my husband for my attention. Yes, tonight, I will surely even be slow to respond to the hunger of my children.
“What?” I will say, looking up in a daze from the computer, “Dinnertime already?”
The scaffold of my day, the family schedule that brings a peaceful haven to our lives will be submerged in the pursuit of hypotheses and the design of experiments to test them.
So I adapt myself to the need to write. Oblivious to everything, as if time was ample, except for the pressing and peculiar desire to post this blog before I dive back in.
[This post greatly benefited from Annie Dillard’s wonderful book “The Writing Life”]
Thanks for this post, Pamela! It’s wonderful. It’s so interesting to get a glimpse at the driving force behind science (if I may label you with such a loud tag). I can’t say that I ever experienced what you describe – the need to think about and work on the science. I wonder if that’s what separates the people who choose to pursue a career in science from those who decide on something else. Really though, I would like to wish your level of engagement and commitment for everyone. Work isn’t really work when you want to do it all the time, right?
hi Anna
Thanks for the kind words.
Maybe you feel that way about blogging?
A wonderfully engaging post – and amazing that you had the time to write it!
Yes, probably crazy to take the time but you only go around once… Encouraging words from fellow scientists helps to keep one going, doesnt it?
Wise words indeed! And I totally agree about the value of mutual support – very restorative and one of the important potential benefits of the blogosphere.
YES! Pamela – well done to capture that feeling! And “the pressing and peculiar desire to post this blog” is a delightful phrase.
If I let myself go and follow up on the desire to really develop an idea (as one must do if it will take the form of a grant proposal), it’s always very exciting and wonderful, but rarely do my more tangential, explosive ideas actually bear out in anything concrete. It sometimes feels rather self-indulgent, since I rarely have the means to actually supervise these projects. And then I get accused – the word is consciously chosen – by my more focused peers of dispersing my intellectual resources. It’s not untrue.
But yours (and mine) is the creative way of doing science. And by golly, we need diverse approaches, just like we need a diverse gene pool, and for the same reasons.
Great post, Pamela.
Heather, do you meant that you end up proposing your more tangible explosive ideas, which are then reviewed by your more more focused peers who dont go for it?
Perhaps it would work to write a more mainstream proposal and just sneak 1-2 of the wild ideas in there.
It’s more the thing you get when you are dreaming, and you think you’ve found the key to understanding the universe, or you have a profound storyline unfold in your head, then you wake up and think, I had better write this down fast! So you do, and jot down the barebones of it. Then you go have breakfast and come back to your writing and try to flesh it out, and realize you’ve made some sort of creature that is absolutely nonviable in the raw light of day.
It’s not so much that this sort of idea makes it to review. The (rare) reproaches come at the level of spending my time sidetracking into other topics when it might be better spent carrying through with and developing those ideas that are already under investigation.
There are just not enough hours in a day to do everything I’d want to. It’s a common complaint.
“Absolutley nonviable in the raw light of day.”
I certainly know what you mean. Of course it was still fund dreaming and often some piece of that prfound storyline makes it into a projects one day.
Do you have two blogs? Are you also alethea? You definitely need more time.
In fact wouldnt it be nice if we had a secret eighth day once a week all to our selves- we could catch up on blogging an political news.
That is an inspiring piece of writing, it sounds magical. I hope I can reach that state of mind, that ability to block everything out and consume myself in the mysteries of life…I would like to live in such a place…
Thanks Farooq. Indeed it is a very nice place. Sometimes though, when you leave it, you return to a very messy house.
LOL! I just got back to a sink full of dishes. I swear. (Yes, I also go by Alethea – old handle dating back to the era I thought it was clever to mislead others as to my name by using one evoking “truth”…).
And your reference to Annie Dillard got me going to see what she’s written since Tinker Creek – I’m a wee bit behind. So I’ll start recent and move back, and have just ordered The Maytrees. Thanks!
I havent read the Maytrees. Thanks for the tip-I will look for it.
I was riveted by “The Writing Life”- because of her insights into writing and the creative process in general (e.g. science).