texified

Do you divide your life up into compartments?  Do you have one compartment for home, another for work, perhaps others for different aspects of y our life?  Occasionally I will hear someone referred to as a person who partitions his life.  It is usually spoken of as something that is undesirable.  They said that about Bill Clinton and how he was able to compartmentalize aspects of his personality.    I never quite understood why this is an undesirable trait.

      At work we know various people on a certain level.  We interact with them in a particular manner also.  At work I try to not have my personal life slop over into what I do at work.  Personally I find this to be an efficient way to act.  I do know people at work, however, that can’t keep their home life out of their professional life.  I often wonder if they allow their work to overlap into their home life.

         I suppose that this partitioning or compartmentalizing can be undesirable if carried to extremes.   In such a case a person could be living a disjointed sort of life with no cohesion to link the parts.  The extreme would be a person with a split personality.

       I’m reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson by William Stearne Randall (one volume, 708 pp).  In this time when we have just finished an election season and have watched hundreds of millions of dollars spent to elect candidates of uncertain qualifications, it is refreshing to read of a man so eminently qualified to not only be president but also to have written the Declaration of Independence.  I knew that Jefferson was a rennaisance man, a polymath and a genius, but I really had no idea of just how remarkable the man was!