Scattered

I've had a full morning of working on phase II of my lit review, and I feel very scattered at the moment. For fun, let me try a few metaphors of how I feel and where I am.

I feel as if I am playing 52 card pick up. The deck has been cast in the air and the cards are strewn all over the place. I am picking up card by card trying to put them into some order.

I am working on putting together a puzzle. There are a zillion pieces all over the table. I have bunches of pieces together that form some coherent pictures, but there are still lots of scattered pieces. I also find pieces that might fit in one place or another or actually do fit in multiple places. It is a three dimensional puzzle.

I also feel as if I am going through old boxes in the attic to see what to throw away. I am going through old articles, notebooks, books, and my notes and it is slow tedious work as I am drawn in to pulling out and examining each treasure in the boxes from the attic.

What is another metaphor for my current state?

I also feel something like I am working on a project with bricks or stones. Let's say I'm building a wall. The bricks are all in a pile in the front drive, but my wall is in the back. As I put together my wall, I have to carry these bricks. Also, as I make the wall I have to handle the bricks. But they are heavy and I can only carry a few bricks at a time. The information is so much that can't retain it all in my mind at the same time. I can't carry the pile all at once to the wall. So I am devising ways to carefully carry bricks, sort and categorize them and place them in certain places I can come back to. I have to set up this wide array of bricks so that I can select and place the brick where I want it to go. But this seems to be my typical way of writing. However, this time I am also working with multiple past sets of categorizes sources, and I am struggling with how to deal with those.

I feel also something like I do as I build a sandcastle via the drip method. I'm cupping my hand into a divit half full of water and scooping out a hand full of wet sand and letting it drip to form a rampart or a tower. Pour, dripdrip, drip, ... drip, higher higher building little by little drip by drip slowly drip by drip but still building and building.

Ok. Enough for now. I have more work to do.