Doing Nothing?

As I've probably made more than clear through the years, I seek variety, changes in routine. They keep us out of ruts; they keep us young. Changes of scene, of workout and workload. Even changes in cuisine (though I'm not as good about that one). 

Lately I've been juggling short-term to-dos (writing here, completing schoolwork) with longer-term writing projects. 

I enjoy having both until deadlines loom. And then ... the only change in routine I crave is to do nothing all day. 

The Nature of Labor

On this first Monday in September I'm thinking of a day long ago when I had a deadline to meet at the same time as the neighbors next door were having a screened-in porch added to the back of their house. While I'm sure there was prep work, in memory it seems as if the thing went up in a day, a week at the very least. 

While the hammers pounded, the nail guns added their one-two punch. There was shouting, laughter, the dull thud of two-by-fours being laid in place. Every so often I would lift my head from the keyboard to monitor the progress.

By dinnertime the porch was framed: an outside room, a place that hadn't existed that morning. I glanced at my screen, at the words I'd cobbled together during the same nine or ten hours. 

Surely we  had all been building something that day, the workmen and I. Surely we had all been laboring. But at the end of the day they had something tangible to show for it ... and, unless I printed a draft, I did not. Writing is a strange occupation. But I can't imagine another one. 

Absorbing

Three years ago on this day I was touring one of the world's great heritage sites, Angkor Wat in Cambodia. My friend and I, on assignment for Winrock, woke early on our day off, made our way through the darkness to the temple complex, then waited for daylight. We were not alone. 

What we found inside almost defies description: the impossibly steep steps...

the draped statuary...

the play of light on ancient carvings. 

Later that day we visited Ta Prohm and marveled at its ruined splendor. With every new twist and turn, with each new vista, I would think, this, this is the most lovely of all. And then I would walk a few feet and find another view even lovelier. 

For five years, I had a job that paid me not just in money but in experiences. I'm still trying to absorb them all.

Winnowing

I'm in a transitional generation, one that has both real and virtual clean-up duties. Not only do I need to tidy up my computer desktop, to create file folders and organize documents and photos within them, I must also deal with the hundreds of real file folders in cabinets in my basement. And those are much heavier. 

They are also filled with gems: Long-ago memos, tattered and worn. Assignment letters from editors who were my mentors and also my friends. Reams of research. Pink "While You Were Away" phone message slips. Studies gathered the old-fashioned way, by going into a brick-and-mortar library, finding the journal and photocopying the pages. 

And then there are the interview notes, all in my near-impossible-to-read scribble. I've tossed pounds and pounds of them, saving only the ones where I've spoken with dear friends or eminent experts. 

As I winnow my way through each folder, I remember how hard I worked to assemble that information, conduct those interviews, take and process those notes. Which baby was I holding at the time? Which child was hanging on my leg?  A part of me thinks I should leave these folders alone; they are too precious to process. But another part of me is greedy for space, for empty file drawers. And these days, that part is winning out.

Summer Tasks

Here it still feels like full-on summer, but with autumn officially beginning next week there's more urgency to complete the tasks of summer — everything from weeding the garden to bathing the dog, a task that may happen later today, depending upon energy levels of both dog and humans.

Perhaps I should say tasks made easier by summer in the latter case, actions more easily performed outside that in, like the sudsing up and rinsing off of a sometimes cantankerous canine, or the cleaning of a feather- and seed-layered birdcage.

On the other hand, it's also nice to read, write and think outside, to look and listen and remember, storing up the cricket sounds and bird calls for a leaner, bleaker season. Those activities should not — and will not — be forgotten. 

A Whirl

The last few days of paid employment are flying away like paper pages from a calendar in an old movie, the gimmick directors used to show time passing. Which is to say quickly.

But that's now. A few months ago time was hanging around my ankles. I kept paging forward in my desk diary, looking at the day I had appointed for notifying management of my decision — it seemed as if it would never arrive. 

So in a way, my experience of time recently has mirrored its journey through our lives: the languid days of childhood, the accelerando of adulthood, the spin-crazy way the pace picks up as we age.

By that reckoning, next week will be quite a whirl. 

By Armchair to Cambodia

We're closing in on the end of the longest month. Outside, the pandemic rages and borders are closing. Time for some armchair travel.

Two years ago I was preparing for a trip to Cambodia. I had yet to see moonlight on the Mekong or sip coconut milk from a straw. I had yet to visit Angkor Wat or Ta Prohm or Bayon. I had yet to meet Bunthan and Dilen and Johnny, the people I traveled with in country. 

But soon I would ride the roads with them. I would learn that Johnny was about to leave his job as driver and go into real estate (in fact, ours was his last trip). I would learn to count on Bunthan's excellent translation and Dilen's knack for noticing what others missed. 

I would also meet the people my organization serves: brave women and men who had known far more of life's difficulties than triumphs. But still, they were building better lives, and we were there to celebrate them.

Armchair travel is comfortable, yes, but ah, I miss the real thing!

Spacious Mind

A happy mind is a spacious mind, intoned the voice that I have come to associate with calm. It's the voice of the Headspace application (its founder, as a matter of fact), and it has been my guide on this several-month journey I've been taking recently, dipping my toe into the shallowest end of the deep waters of meditation.

Any progress I've made has been courtesy of my place of employ, which has sponsored Headspace meditation sessions every workday since mid-March, most of which I've attended.

Some days I'm a hopeless case and can barely follow the instructions. But other days I can feel myself in another place, one where thoughts flit into my mind and just as easily float out again; one where following the breath, flowing with the breath, is becoming a little more second nature.

Today, when I heard this line that a happy mind is a spacious mind, a mind that has room for other people, other ideas, I'll admit I broke the first rule of meditation. I didn't let that thought move through and out. I savored it a bit, I pondered the implications.

Equating happiness with spaciousness, yes, it works — though you could just as easily equate it with coziness and smallness and manageability. But in this case I imagined the clear sky that you reach when you soar above the clouds. The spaciousness of the heavens, of the mind unencumbered.

When Worlds Collide

Working outside means that my worlds collide. 

I sit in the office chair retrieved on Tuesday, a shiny, heavy object with padding everywhere a body needs it — but yesterday I pulled it out onto the deck in full view of the wood bees and the red-shouldered hawk family next door and the knockout rose bush, just planted on the side of the yard. 

In the way that white noise makes one concentrate, the sights and sounds of the outdoors do the same for me. And to concentrate while also seated in comfort is ... divine.

So let the worlds collide. I'm fine with it! 

One Last Look

Not only is my office still in lockdown, with employees required to work from home, but we'll soon move to a new building. By early fall, we'll  have the option of returning to the office, but it won't be this office. Which is why I went down to Crystal City this morning to pack up my chair, standing desk, notebooks and files — and bring them home.

It was a big job that my becoming sentimental made even bigger. I couldn't stop thinking of all the colleagues who once peopled this place. Though I still work with them, we are now squares on a screen or voices on the phone. There is no more banter in the kitchen, no more planking in the hall.

I'll admit that working at home is wonderful, but I miss the camaraderie and the stimulation. I miss the life I used to have. Which is why I spent some time today running around with my phone taking pictures of the place.  Here's where we held potlucks. There's where we started planning the speech it would take me a month to write.

It may sound silly, it took time I didn't have. But I spent the better part of four years in this place. Surely it's worth one last look.

My People

Yesterday,  I had a 4:00 Microsoft Teams meeting followed by a 5:30 Zoom meeting. Nothing strange about back-to-back virtual meetings, the now-familiar squares on the screen. Except that the first was for my paying job and the second for a journalist group I've belonged to for years.

In the first there were blurred backgrounds, and some relatively tidy houses. In the second there were papers and books and sloping roofs. The kinds of rooms I live in, the kinds of rooms I love.

I also noticed the difference in discourse. There were funny, smart people in both meetings, but in the first there was policy discussion (both corporate and political) — and in the second there was observation. Everything from school openings to vaccine development to interview transcription.

It should come as no surprise that a bunch of writers would live amidst books and papers, or that they would offer up a wide-ranging conversation — but it was especially heart-warming yesterday, and it made me feel something both simple and profound. It made me feel that ... these are my people.

Four Years

Four years ago today I started what I still think of as my "new" job. I moved from print to digital journalism, from editing a magazine to being a jack-of-all-trades writer/editor penning op-eds, success stories, profiles, advertising copy and whatever else needs to be done.

On the Friday of my first week I wrote a brief history of the organization. Seven months later, I was sent around the world to report and write stories in Indonesia and Myanmar.

Before I started, my new manager told me that working at Winrock was a little like drinking from a fire hose. He was not exaggerating. There's hardly been a dull moment.

Turns out, I'm a little addicted to the fast-paced workplace. I thrive in it, though increasingly it wears me out. But I always do better with too much on my plate than not enough. And right now, of course, I'm grateful to have this work.

One thing I know for sure, and I say this with great fondness: In this job, I'l always have too much on my plate.

(Street scene in Khulna, Bangladesh, just one of the amazing sights I've seen through my "new" job.)

Drifting Westward

Untethered by office routines, I find my days starting and ending a little later each day. This is especially true because I work closely with people in Central Time, so without the cues of the local office, I am being pulled into their frame of reference.

At some point, there will be a rude awakening. I will have to get up early, put on work clothes and make my way down to the office. But that time seems far away.

For now, we live in a netherworld where there's work aplenty but not only can it be done from the living room couch, but it must be done from the living room couch (or some other remote spot).

So on this rainy Wednesday, as I sip my fourth cup of tea, I find myself drifting ... ever westward.

(Not as far west as this photo would make you think, but a girl's gotta dream!)

Team-Work

An email newsletter I edit has a feature we call Team-Work. We decided to use a hyphen, though the word is typically spelled without it. I can't remember now exactly why we did that, except it had something to do with emphasizing the separate nature of those words, the "team" and the "work."

I bring this up today because, perhaps like many of us, I thrive on a mixture of teamwork and solo endeavors. The percentages of the mix depend on many things, including how busy I am and how protective I am of the product in question.

Lately I've realized that I wouldn't make a very good ghostwriter. Though most of what I write now is without a byline, I'm well compensated for it and believe in the institution. In other situations, I enjoy getting credit for what I write. Not exactly teamwork, but there you have it.

Which is why I chose the multicolored rag rug photo to illustrate this post. It reminds me of the power and the beauty that's possible when many become one.

A Night at the Office

It was a late day at the office. Which didn't mean I was there until the wee hours, only an hour and a half later than usual, just long enough to label, transfer and prune some MP3 files that had been filling up my voice recorder.

My attention had been riveted by the screen for a couple hours, that and my inner ear, where voices from interviews I conducted months ago replayed through an earphone. It's a strange thing, listening to voices heard only once and trying to figure out who they are. It was an interior exercise, a journey into memory, aided by last year's day planner and typed notes.

But back to the matter at hand, which was the long day, the tedious task, and then, finally, completion. I clicked off my computer, packed up my things — and only when I stood up to grab my coat did I look out the window.

And there, spread out before me, was a magical sight. Offices that are drab brown and inscrutable in daylight were all lit up at night. What was normally invisible was suddenly seen. I marveled at the lights and the reflections. I marveled also at the comfort they brought. And that's when it occurred to me, something I know but too often forget — that we're never alone in our toil. Even when we think we are, there are countless others who are close by, working along beside us.

A Poor Trade?

By about 4 p.m. yesterday that extra hour of sleep Saturday night was beginning to seem like a pretty poor trade for the early darkness. The angle of light and the gathering shadows were disorienting, coming as they were a full hour earlier than I was braced to expect them.

In short, it's "fall back" all over again, half of the crazy exercise in discombobulation we undergo twice a year. In this one we gain sleep and lose light — and in the springtime just the opposite, of course.

As an early riser, I technically shouldn't mind this shift, because the light we lose in the evening we gain in the morning. But arriving home in darkness truncates the part of the day that belongs to us.  I always feel a bit robbed these first dark evenings.

I'll get used to it eventually; I always do. And then it will become so much the norm that the bright evenings of early spring will seem an assault on the senses, leaving me blinking, as if someone flipped on the lights in the middle of the night.

Q4

I believe this is my shortest blog title ever, though not my shortest blog post ... at least I don't think it will be!

It dawned on me the other day that I'm starting to think in quarters. Not 25-cent quarters, but business-year quarters. This is in part because I work for a nonprofit organization that talks of quarters, and I attend all-staff meetings that have recently begun happening four times a year rather than more often and more randomly.

And it was at that meeting, with its talk of the Q3 just ending and the Q4 to come, that I thought ... hmmm, this is different: thinking in quarters rather than single months.  It's perfect for the speeding up of time that seems to be more and more the subliminal topic of my days.

But it is also a convenient way to frame time, to chunk it up, so to speak. And although in one way it makes time speed up (already in the fourth quarter!), in another it makes it slow down (there are three months to measure instead of just one). It's yet another way to live our lives ... and I'm always looking for those.

The Vacation Typo

If relaxation means typing "vest" instead of "versa" or "swet" instead of "swerve" then I'm officially in vacation mode.

Those errors, since corrected, remind me this morning that my editing eye must be officially closed for the duration.

What I hope is not, what I hope is wide open, is the "inward eye," the one that helps me notice all the hues in pool water, the liquidity of the cerulean, the merging of the teal and the turquoise, the azure and the ultramarine.

That's the part of me switched off too often, the part bypassed for efficiency's sake. And oh, how I want to reawaken it!

Smelling the Roses

It's been a short trip to the Natural State. I leave later today. Amidst the work I absolutely have to do, I find time to visit with people I don't usually see. It's what makes it rich, and it makes me think how shallow life can be when efficiency rules.

Dozens of times each year I vow to be less efficient, to smell the roses, to take life easier. And dozens of times I break that vow.

But I'm an optimist, so I think ... maybe this time it will be different. It probably won't be. I know that. But I can always try.

Usually Summer

The armchair travel of yesterday's post has an explanation, of course. It's almost solstice. School's out for summer.

Once a student and teacher, always one, I guess. Or at least always attached to that kind and gentle calendar, the one that offers summer after a long year of toil.

I know that I live in a fortunate time, one in which I don't have to work every waking minute, one in which I can expect to have some years off at the end of a long working life.

But to get there requires much shouldering to the grindstone now. Most of the time, the grindstone is cleverly disguised as a mission, a life's work, But sometimes, it isn't.

And when it isn't ... it's usually summer.