productively productive

Sometimes, like now, it feels as if the biggest challenge is to remind oneself how worthwhile is one's own project, plan, product, no matter what, no matter how we do it.
Today is Monday, the first Monday of the month of November, 2007. I should have finished my third thesis two thousand years ago - or at least, this last summer- but no, I'm still here working on it. I used to love the academic environment, however since the last year and a half I'm quite oppressed by it, as I really feel the time to be somewhere else and doing something else is now, and is rushing out.
It's like a river flowing very fast, and I look at it and I want to jump in it and swim in it but I just learnt now to swim again, and I'm not that practical yet - so I'm afraid. In the meanwhile, the fact that I still need to produce this last academic work within a short time doesn't give me the pleasure I used to feel when I was writing before. So I'm not enjoying this time either.
I am looking at the flowing river with the feeling that my breath will be taken away any moment, without having done something really meaningful yet - maybe this feeling is wrong, but it's there and it hurts.
It is probably a common pattern among human beings, to be refrained in facing the river, but soon or later everybody does. Sometimes it takes too long, and then you are swallowed by the water because you forgot how to use your abilities in handling it. It will be nice if it will not take me that long.