I wanted to write about motivation but, really, who has the energy for that? It’s something akin to ennui that’s been afflicting me the last few days. Not ennui, but something close to it. If there’s a place where that feeling and paralysis by analysis might intersect, that’s where I’ve been living.
There is much to do, but it seems like a lot so …
You power through, because that’s what professionals do. But there isn’t a lot of joy in that. There is, instead, a tiny bit of fear: What if I messed up an important date, or sequence or things, because I found myself with a galloping case of Tuesdays that covered the first part of the first week of the new year?
Besides, he said on Monday, there’s tomorrow. Which is the same thing he said on Tuesday. And what he spent part of today saying.
Tomorrow, much work will be done.
Getting a good solid start, that’s the secret. It isn’t motivation; it’s momentum. Tomorrow I will create it. I will manufacture it. I will rip it from the air and these keys at my fingertips. I know the secret. The secret is to find the opposite of ennui, enthusiasm, in deadlines.
The self-imposed deadlines start tomorrow.
This is the 21st installment of We Learn Wednesdays. I’ve been riding my bike across the county to find the local historical markers. This one isn’t in the Historical Marker Database, but it’s the 40th one we’ve seen in this series. And the marker is about a now empty lot.
I can’t find anything with a few simple searches about that first academy. But the town’s high school was here, too, for a few years in the early part of the 20th century, before moving down the street and around the corner. I found a photo of the class of 1907. Someone wrote that it had 18 students, the largest the school had enrolled to that point. It also included the school’s first black graduate, apparently. If that’s true, it is interesting, since the marker tells us integration came later.
There were postcards featuring the Copner school. Here’s another one.
There were two generations of men named Samuel in the Copner family around that time. I believe that old school was named after the first. He was said to be an early and loud advocate for public schools in the area.
There’s also a black-and-white of the old Grant Grammar school.
Here’s the lot(s) today.
That church will come up in a future edition of We Learn Wednesdays. In the next installment, we’ll see a house that dates, in part, back to the 17th century. It has, as you might expect, a busy history. If you’ve missed any markers so far, you can find them all right here.
