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Slouching Toward Improvement

Slouching Toward Improvement

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I have a long career in slouching: sliding down into the comfy cushions of the new couch, propping myself up with pillows in the overstuffed chair and, before these pieces of furniture were here, doing whatever I could to make horizontal whatever vertical piece of furniture I inhabited. 

Maybe it comes from having long legs and needing a place to put them. Or maybe from spending way too much time on my posterior. Whatever it is, I’m vowing to change. 

The reason: I’ve come to realize something I knew all along but which my forgiving back has let me ignore: that young slouchers may look all limber and cozy, but old slouchers look pained. 

I’m sitting up straighter, aided by a fine office chair that encourages good posture. When I’m not there I’m either standing (as I am now) or putting pillows behind my back to keep myself upright. 

It will take a while, this shift in posture. But I’m … slouching toward improvement. 

Lessons from the Pandemic

Lessons from the Pandemic

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We received word late yesterday that the earliest the U.S.-based employees in my organization (which is most of us) will return to the office is April 1, 2021. By then, it will have been a full year of remote work. 

As it stands now, we are well into our eighth month. Almost long enough to make a baby. In fact, here’s a thought: infants conceived at the beginning of the pandemic will soon be out in the world. The Quarantine Generation. Gen Q?
What else has been gestating? Fear and confusion, to be sure. Divisiveness, absolutely. But also, as many have noted, a renewed closeness with the natural world. 
What I was trying to get at yesterday, but didn’t quite, is that the outside office, my “deck desk,” is not just a bucolic retreat; it’s at the mercy of the elements. I’ve dashed inside to avoid raindrops, wrapped up in a blanket to withstand the cold. And soon, perhaps even today (I’m writing this an evening ahead), I will be forced inside. 
Being more attuned to the natural world is instructive, though; through it, we can better understand what the pandemic is so rudely teaching us: that we are not in charge. That can be ugly, true. But it can also be beautiful. 
The Deck Desk

The Deck Desk

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For the last many months my desk has been a glass-topped table on the deck. It’s where I’ve scattered my notebook and planner, where I’ve carefully placed my laptop and phone after wiping the glass to remove even the tiniest drop of dew. 

It’s a table that gives me a front-row seat on the natural world. Squirrels and chipmunks scamper a few feet away from me, searching for acorns. Cherry tomatoes still cling to the vine. The hanging basket of New Guinea impatiens has thinned and browned, but there are still enough bright flowers to remind me of summer.

Even as the leaves turn from green to yellow — and power tool sounds from lawnmowers to leaf blowers — I sit here still. This is my workplace, my deck desk.

Still Outside

Still Outside

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I write this post as I have written so many others the past few months: sitting on the deck in this lovely outside “room,” where I have a front-row seat on bird flight, leaf fall and squirrel shenanigans. 

It’s quite mild and pleasant now, but Monday morning I took the call to al fresco work to rather ridiculous proportions. Bundled in three layers of cotton, wool and down, I cut the fingertips off a pair of old gloves and donned a hat, too. My colleagues said I looked ready for the ski slopes. Instead, I was ready for a hot bath. It took a while to thaw out! 

The fact is, I don’t want to move inside. Moving inside means winter is coming, means the boundaries are closing in. I have a fantasy that I can work out here at least down to 50 degrees F. And, as long as it’s not windy (which was Monday’s problem), I think I can. 

As for now, I’m looking at the splendor around me: trees just starting to turn, flowering annuals holding bloom, sunlight dappling the lawn. It’s October, it’s mellow, and (yes!) I’m still working outside. 

Forty-Nine!

Forty-Nine!

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It was 49 degrees when I woke up this morning. While we have moved up into the low 60s, I’m still wrapped in a blanket wearing a wool sweater (the first time to don my toasty new Inishmore-knit cardigan) and sipping hot chai.

My plan, you see, is to work outside as long as I can this season. But based on my wimpy response today I barely give myself to the end of the month. 

Given where I live, however, I realize I could be sweating in record-breaking humidity in just a few days. So for now, I plan to sit tight, wrap up when necessary, shed layers when not, and write al fresco until the cold chases me indoors.

Public Transport

Public Transport

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My world changed dramatically on March 12, 2020, the last day I commuted into Washington, D.C. for my job. With my company having decided that the earliest we will return is January 2021, and the openness to telework after that, I think it’s fairly safe to assume that I probably won’t have to work in an office full-time again.

This is amazing in many ways, one of which is that is that I’ve gone from riding public transport three to four times a week to … not at all. And I’m not the only one. According to statistics in this morning’s Washington Post, ridership in one local transit system dropped by 95 percent. Similar shifts are happening in cities all over the country. 

I’m sorry about this, sorry because I think public transportation is the way more of us should be getting around. But I’m happy too, because my commute was a grueling, often three-hour roundtrip. I imagine I’m not alone in these mixed feelings. 

It’s only one of many challenges created by the strange new environment in which we live. Only one of many models, ways of doing things, that are crumbling, morphing, transforming, becoming a new world, seemingly overnight.

Spacious Mind

Spacious Mind

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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

When Worlds Collide

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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

One Last Look

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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

My People

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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.