5:45 AM Tuesday  

Darkness. Daylight is becoming more elusive. Summer's official end looms on the calendar.

Email has been read and answered. 

The first meeting begins in fifteen minutes. It will be meetings for three hours, then two hours of work, followed by two hours of meetings.

The last meeting ended at 6:45 PM, eleven hours ago. 

How do meetings from morning to evening help keep 'life work balance'? How are employees expected to have and keep the healthy balance the company claims to support when such constant demands are made and everything else must be shoehorned around these schedules and requirements? 

Be happy you have a job, is the rallying response. It's tough to have a job and keep a job in this economy, everyone says. Be thankful you're employed. So 'we the employed' grit it out. 

How do others do this? Is it just that I've been working almost forty years and I'm tired of it? Do others really achieve sustaining joy from doing this stuff? 

I'm probably one of the more fortunate of the 'be thankful you have a job' tribe in the sense that my work isn't dangerous and not physically taxing. That it pays well. 

It remains at will. It's day to day. I can be released any day with no promise of any severance. 

Yes, whining. Yes, weariness. Yesterday was a long, frustrating day; another one is beginning. 

This treadmill's squeaking and groaning under the effort. 

This whining is part of my mental treadmill. After relaxing, enjoying life for a few days, jumping back onto the treadmill jars me. 

The meeting has begun. I'm listening to them, talking to them, while I'm typing this. I'm waking up. A pulse is returning. Blood is flowing. 

Ironically, the call is on the cost of doing business in other geos. We're trying to understand those costs. Some of them are staggering high. 

As we talk finance, I'm writing about the cost of doing business and living life. 

Quantifying costs...quantifying life. 

Better than thinking of other places where they're quantifying freedom.