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Exploring Efficiency

Exploring Efficiency

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As the days of full-time employment wind down for me, I’m thinking about efficiency, how it has ruled my life for as long as I can remember. 

Efficiency has always seemed an essential. I don’t know how people tackle life without it. But it has downsides, starting with how it stunts creativity. 

How does the mind roam free when the ticking clock of duties runs persistently in the background? Are there certain places and postures that help to dispel efficiency? Can one simply shut it off once it’s no longer needed, or is one stuck with it?

I will be exploring these questions at length … starting May 1. 

(My old office, where I was usually efficient.) 

Calm Start

Calm Start

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The world outside my office window is brown and green and gray, a palette of soft colors for a foggy morning.

I woke to the sound of an early bird, a cardinal perhaps. But since that first song it’s been still and quiet, a calm start to what I hope is a calm weekend.

It’s time to get caught up on errands both inside and outside the house, time to collect myself before the changes to come.

The Unvoiced

The Unvoiced

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I read an essay over the weekend about the writer Tillie Olsen, whose impact was large though her output was small. It was that last point that comforted and inspired me. And not for the best of reasons. As I contemplate a life soon freed of the day job, I’m already looking for excuses. 

Before, I could always say … gee, I wish I could write more of my own stuff, but I have to work for my living. What will I use for an excuse now? This essay, by A. O. Scott in the New York Times Book Review, provides a blueprint. I’m going to quote liberally from it, because it articulates an exhaustion I’ve long felt but seldom read about. The italics are mine.  

Olsen was a writer her whole life — she died in 2007 — but she didn’t write much. Not because she was blocked or lacked material. The blockage — the obligation of earning a living and tending children, the “immersion” in caring that was a source of fulfillment as well as frustration — was the subject matter. The silence that surrounds those stories is its own kind of statement.

Is there a place in literature — in our canons and course listings, in our criticism and theory — for unwritten work? … Literary ethics prompts us to attend to the unheard and the marginal; curiosity or impatience with the same old stuff sends us in search of the forgotten and the neglected. But what kind of attention do we owe — what kind of attention is it even possible to pay — to the unvoiced?

I’d have to go back to an essay by Ursula Le Guin, “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Writes the Books,”  to find words that so perfectly describe the unique challenges facing the woman who raises children, makes a home, holds a job and dares call herself a writer. 

It’s a topic I soon hope to explore with renewed relish — or at least, that’s the plan.

The “R Word”

The “R Word”

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This week, I’ve begun to share the news with colleagues that, come May, I will start a new phase of life, one without the grind of daily work-for-pay. You might say I’m “retiring,” though that’s a loaded word in my vocabulary.

Writers seldom retire, but editorial directors for international development organizations do, so I’ll use their nomenclature when necessary. 

The fact of the matter, though, is that I don’t much care for the “R word.” It sounds like Bermuda shorts and golf courses and happy gray-haired couples staring off into the sunset. 

Which won’t look much like what I’ll be doing, which is writing and peddling my work, not so much a new thing as an old one with a twist — a return to the freelance world I inhabited happily for decades but with less of the financial pressure. 

Still, it’s an adjustment, one I’ve been mulling over privately for months — and one I can finally mull over publicly here. 

Last ‘Normal’ Day

Last ‘Normal’ Day

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On this same equivalent Thursday last year, I rose early, dressed quickly and left the house. It was the last day of a three-day conference that I had first dreaded but had warmed to because it brought together people I work with but seldom see. We met at a downtown location, and on the last day I went in early so I could take a walk beforehand. 

Though the coronavirus was much on our minds — the bathrooms were mobbed at every break with people obsessively washing their hands — there was much yet we didn’t know. We didn’t wear masks, we didn’t practice social distancing, and we took our lunch in a common room, all 80 or so of us scooping our salads and fruit from common bowls and eating together at small, cocktail-sized tables. 

Since Thursday was the finale, at the end of the day many of us went across the street to a watering hole where we huddled even closer to each other. In retrospect I would kick myself for that, especially when I learned that at least one of the attendees came down with Covid right after the event. 

We knew something was coming, and in fact we learned that day that we would be working remotely the next week, but we could never have known that a year later we would still be hunkered down in our houses and apartments, waiting to resume a normal life we’re not sure will come again. 

The Point of ‘PossibiliDay’

The Point of ‘PossibiliDay’

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Today is International Woman’s Day, one of the 31 days that comprise Women’s History Month, and one of many observation days we celebrate at Winrock International.

It is also a day I dubbed “PossibiliDay” back in 2017, when I’d been at my then-new job almost a year and was celebrating the freedom of my new work and an awakening to the power of possibility. 

This year, March 8 feels far more International Woman’s Day than “PossibiliDay,” a fact I attribute to almost five years in this position, the last one spent working entirely at home. 

But this is okay, I tell myself. Because the point of “PossibiliDay” is not to mark it every year. It’s to remember that possibilities lurk where we least expect them — and to take heart from that fact. 

Floating

Floating

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It’s President’s Day, a celebration conflation closer this year to Lincoln’s day (February 12) than to Washington’s (February 22). 

Up until last year it was a holiday on my work calendar. This year it has been nixed to give us one floating holiday, which we can use to celebrate a birthday, religious observance or whatever we want. 

I decided to take my floating holiday today, since I’d already been planning on it and since it is, for me, more of a “Beat the Winter Doldrums Day” than anything else. 

With one ice storm melting away and another gearing up for later in the week, I plan to hunker down, to read, write and organize (not too much of the latter, I bet). In other words… to float.

By Armchair to Cambodia

By Armchair to Cambodia

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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!

Focus

Focus

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In the Headspace journey I’m taking courtesy of a program at work, we just finished a 30-day course on finding focus. We learned that focus in not something you must learn and strive for; it’s something you already have. 

Finding focus means attending to the moment, losing yourself in the here and now. It’s like an image used at the beginning of the Headspace program, one of blue sky and clouds. Blue sky is always there, but clouds hide it, just as the stresses of daily living block the natural calm that can be ours if we learn to still ourselves. 

This morning we take another, more advanced course on mindfulness. I’m grateful for these opportunities — because there’s never been a better time to master the art of living in the here and now. 

Vienna Waits For You

Vienna Waits For You

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Yesterday, for the first time since March 12, I drove to the Vienna Metro Station. Though assured that the money I’d had taken from my paycheck would remain on the flex account charge card past year’s end, I wasn’t going to test it out. I needed the funds from the credit card to be on the Metro card — and drove there to make the transfer.

It was my first trip to Vienna Metro in nine months, and I relished the old twists and turns of the drive there: Fox Mill to Vale to Hunter Mill to Chain Bridge to Old Courthouse to Sutton and on to the station. 

The lighting was all wrong, of course. I usually did this leg of the commute in darkness or early morning shadows. And the traffic was much lighter, as it is most everywhere most all of the time.

But once there, it was not at all like the Vienna Metro Station I know.  I found myself improbably alone, like the survivor of a nuclear apocalypse. There were no cabs idling, no buskers singing, no harried commuters rushing to and fro. The place was as lonesome as a schoolyard in summer.

Here was a place I knew like the back of my hand. Here was a round-trip I took most work days in my former life. It was a place and a practice that changed abruptly last spring. And I doubt it will ever be the same.