(RIP Jimmy Breslin. This blog post is in his memory: finding a paperback copy of _The World of Jimmy Breslin_ for sale in 1968 at the Marion Parlor drugstore in Greenville, Mississippi, changed my life.)
For many reasons, we sometimes need to step back from the job and regroup, recharge and refocus. The late writer Jimmy Breslin needed that hiatus from his New York newspaper column, after witnessing the killing of Robert Kennedy in June 1968. Breslin completed his first novel during this hiatus, when he needed to discover if he could go back to the routine of newspaper work. Too much information to manage, until the novel was out and had its own life. When it was time, Breslin would have said that no one else in the news business was telling the news as they should. As he would.
Spring baseball is progressing as it should, with the opener for the 2016 World Champions of Major League Baseball away in St. Louis. The rivalry remains fierce, for the Cards got Fowler one year after the Cubs got Heyward. Spring games in the Arizona Cactus League are not only entertainment for the faithful fans, needing an early respite from Winter, but for the players - an initial respite after respite after respite. After one game, you decide you had better choke up more when there are two strikes. After another game, you saw that you had better catch the defensive signs signaled from the bench. Every respite after a spring game lets you collect and assimilate the motor memories you'll need, once the regular season starts and it is a wild ride until game #162.
If you're in a university training program in SLP, you may have either started or completed your spring vacation. If you are employed in a clinical position, you're collecting your thoughts today for the work week to come. "Should I have given that stimulus so quickly after the first series?" "Why didn't I make a note about the paraphasia on that part of the Boston?" "They ask me to attend all these meetings, and then they criticize my productivity numbers!" One lesson learned with time in the professions, as in life, is that an omission can't be un-omitted, and that you have to discard with a respite, regrets and recriminations about what has happened. Herbert Simon indeed remarked in 1971, that the growth of information to be processed in our daily life, occurs at the expense of attention required to process it.
Once the new week engages, the communication game with persons served begins again.
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