Parallelism, spinning plates

This seems to be a very philosophical title but there is no need to be as deep. The reason we are all here, and when I say here I mean the rig, is Money. Money we all need to pay for and fuel or homes, feed our families and provide us with a few luxuries to make spending the extra time away from home worth the while.
Some folks on the rig are happy with that life. They enjoy or have become content with consistency of their day to day work and the familiarity of their surroundings on the rig. These people are part of the institution that is every individual place offshore and this is their place. The institution makes it easy to dissociate itself with the other part of that persons life that takes place with their family and friends in a different place and time from this. It is almost as if the two existences run in parallel. For even when the crew member isn’t here there is a presence, reminders and markers of that persons place on the rig.
Others on the rig attempt to move away from this place as often as their day to day responsibilities allow them. They are living a life of escapism into worlds of computer games and movies emerging occasionally to sustain their profession or body. When they return to the other half of their lives that happens away from this place do they still try to escape from that place too? To live your life outside of reality is another parallelism. You are here but not, you are elsewhere but not. And then to be at home is a third and fourth parallel on which you live life.
The ability to cope with this parallelism is what make some people better at working away. They are able to sustain a parallel existence. A life which changes irregularly and has a blocky profile as their time switches between each parallel.
I am not a person who can live in too many parallel worlds. I am bad at keeping the plates spinning in my absence. I let them crash to the floor, one by one, until there are one or two wobbling away in the foreground my limit is three. Home(Jenny and Family), work and one other, which is usually the plate that falls off and I put back on quickly while no one watches. This means that home and work wobble and the other plate could be the first one that comes to hand as I stoop down quickly to pick it off the floor. This could be Sailing, Motorbike or Friends.
So the two or three parallels that I live on when offshore are my bandwidth, the speed of my connection with the outside world. A world of parallels on which I live, work and exist. These parallels change when I am not offshore. They drop an octave to a place where my three parallels are different again and the work plate rarely makes it off the ground…..unless I pick it up by mistake.