Happy Solstice, to those who celebrate.

Winter solstice time-lapse photo of the sun over an Alaskan mountain range, by Todd Paris.

It seems that the range of my creative expression trends with the length of days. Summer lasts forever in New Orleans. And in those long meandering days, it feels like there is an endless supply of inspiration, and bountiful time to sit with one muse or another until we both have had our fill.

When the fall semesters arrive, I feel ready.

But invariably, I am not.

Teaching is intense: often with a large-room undergraduate course running alongside a graduate course that has fewer students, but hours and hours more preparation. Office hours, practice problems, reviews, visualizations and strategy sheets. Then the grading and grading and grading,

Application season is all-consuming: final drafts of necessary papers must be submitted; research statements must be crafted; job talks and elevator pitches must be vetted and sharpened. And then the avalanche of letters, support for summer programs, graduate programs, postdoctoral positions, tenure-track positions, tenure and promotion, recognition within societies, evaluation for prizes.

The ambitions of the academic new year take their toll: grants must be agonized over and submitted; program initiatives are developed and delivered, or more often discarded on a trash heap of good intentions; this-time-is-going-to-be-different sets of lecture notes are mapped out and executed in exquisite detail ... for fully one-tenth of the course material.

The maelstrom of family events: the soccer practices, the school productions, the sleepovers, the homework, the last-minute studying; bumps, bruises, the sniffles, the flu, the unexpected trip to the ER; the stop at the snowball stand because it's all going to be ok.

This is a privileged and wonderful life. I am thankful for it every day. But it is also a monumental challenge to do the one thing I originally set out to do: to live in and explore a beautiful world of mathematics.

And so it seems every year that the shortening of the days tracks with a shortening of spirit. The creative contraction proceeds through to the moment of grade submission (almost always completed in the dead of night). And then, quite by accident, or perhaps some grand cosmological design (or more likely, a centuries-long co-evolution of human economic activity with the harsh realities of winter), on the day he sunshine makes its pivot, I too am ready. With so much accomplished, and importantly, so much left behind, there is room to contemplate and to celebrate. Holidays, family and friends, presents and hugs, soulful commiserations. And a sudden expansion of time. At last some room to fashion ambitions; to plan investigations; and most exciting of all, room to try once again to give these precious waiting thoughts a chance to go out and play.

So, happy Solstice, fellow traveler. Welcome to this new venue.

Thank you for reading. I hope you'll stay for more.