Tag: Work

“What you do when you’re not working, not being productive…”

~ Live & Learn ~ 42 Comments

“…Birding has tripled the time I spend outdoors. It has pushed me to explore Oakland in ways I never would have: Amazing hot spots lurk within industrial areas, sewage treatment plants and random residential parks. It has proved more meditative than meditation. While birding, I seem impervious to heat, cold, hunger and thirst. My senses focus resolutely on the present, and the usual hubbub in my head becomes quiet. When I spot a species for the first time — a lifer — I course with adrenaline, while being utterly serene…

“When I step out my door in the morning, I take an aural census of the neighborhood, tuning in to the chatter of creatures that were always there and that I might previously have overlooked. The passing of the seasons feels more granular, marked by the arrival and disappearance of particular species instead of much slower changes in day length, temperature and greenery. I find myself noticing small shifts in the weather and small differences in habitat. I think about the tides…

Of course, having the time to bird is an immense privilege. As a freelancer, I have total control over my hours and my ability to get out in the field. “Are you a retiree?” a fellow birder recently asked me. “You’re birding like a retiree.” I laughed, but the comment spoke to the idea that things like birding are what you do when you’re not working, not being productive.

I reject that. These recent years have taught me that I’m less when I’m not actively looking after myself, that I have value to my world and my community beyond ceaseless production, and that pursuits like birding that foster joy, wonder and connection to place are not sidebars to a fulfilled life but their essence.

It’s easy to think of birding as an escape from reality. Instead, I see it as immersion in the true reality. I don’t need to know who the main characters are on social media and what everyone is saying about them, when I can instead spend an hour trying to find a rare sparrow. It’s very clear to me which of those two activities is the more ridiculous. It’s not the one with the sparrow.

— Ed Yong, from “When I Became a Birder, Almost Everything Else Fell Into Place (NY Times, March 30, 2024)

Photo: DK @ Cove Island Park, March 31, 2024. Canada Geese at sunrise. More photos from that morning here.

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

~ Live & Learn ~ 18 Comments

Yeongju, a former office employee in Seoul, is suffering from intense burnout: After a career-driven life in which she toiled through vacations and saw her husband in their corporate canteen more often than at home, she quits her job, files for divorce, and moves across the city for a fresh start. She doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life—but she loves to read, and uses her savings to open a bookshop in Hyunam-dong, a neighborhood she chooses because one of the characters in its name means “rest.”

But Yeongju quickly realizes that her new life still involves work. She is frequently drowning in book orders, accounting tasks, and inventory checks. When she’s not treading water, she’s hosting a monthly book club or running a popular interview series with authors. Sometimes she will “stew in regret” at all of her freshly assumed responsibilities, but she finds that she usually isn’t satisfied until she completes them…

Such moments underscore that Hwang’s characters don’t actually want to stop being industrious; they’re just trying to build up a more satisfying understanding of work for themselves, one that doesn’t bind their “whole identity and value” to a company. They discover, for one, the benefits of goals that are short-term, simple, and malleable. “Instead of agonising over what you should do, think about putting effort into whatever you’re doing,” Seungwoo, the programmer turned writer, tells Mincheol, the disenchanted high-schooler. Minjun “anchor[s] himself with coffee,” simply focusing on making the best cup he can. The point is not for them to clearly define what makes them happy but rather to recognize the moments in which they are. What the bookshop’s denizens come to see is that the problems with their former office environments—no matter how widespread—couldn’t always explain why they were miserable, or teach them how not to be. What they can do, as they reconsider how to spend their lives, is pay close attention to what they’re doing, and do it with care.

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…before Monday arrives like a fist

~ Live & Learn ~ 23 Comments

 

this life gives us only so many hours
to share & how we share, i worry,
is wasteful-Sunday night & the tv on,
so we don’t look at each other.
on screen some reality tv stars
threaten to choke each other out.
my love, we are bad television,
happy as we are to hold hands
& eat greasy pizza together
during these small breaths
before Monday arrives like a fist.

— Josè Olivarez, “Sunday Love” in “Promises of Gold” (Henry Holt & Company, February 14, 2023) (via Alive on All Channels)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

~ Live & Learn ~ 62 Comments

It started on Tuesday, last week. I mistitled the post Monday Morning Wake-Up Call and here we were on Tuesday, after a long weekend. You can see where my head was at.

Rather than post original content (well is dry), I threw up yet another clip from yet another distinguished poet, essayist or author. This one by Arthur Brooks on Kierkegaard’s Three Ways to live move fully – – – instead of seeking a new life, the answer is to go deeper in the one you have.

Kiki, a virtual friend and follower, ever vigilant, gets right to the gist of the matter. So, why’d you post it? What’s going on with you? The first two nicked me. The last one – – which Kiki floated in over the weekend…Don’t you have anything of your own to post? Now that hit a nerve.

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Sunday Morning Wake-Up Call

~ Live & Learn ~ 82 Comments

A few months ago, I was teetering on the brink of feeling overwhelmed by life’s responsibilities, afflicted by the ambient anxiety that seems to be an intrinsic part of life in the 2020s. In an effort to maintain — or maybe restore — my sanity, I embarked on a personal endurance challenge.

Other people, at similar moments, begin competing in grueling triathlons, or head off on intensive meditation retreats. Me? I decided to give up listening to podcasts or music while running, or driving, or loading the dishwasher, or doing almost anything else. To just focus, in other words, on what it was I was actually doing, one activity at a time.

It was surprisingly hard. Once you’ve finished mocking me for treating such a trifling alteration to my habits like a grand existential struggle, I have one request: Try it. Identify the small tricks you use to avoid being fully present with whatever you’re doing, and put them aside for a week or two.

You may discover, as I did, that you were unwittingly addicted to not doing one thing at a time. You might even come to agree with me that restoring our capacity to live sequentially — that is, focusing on one thing after another, in turn, and enduring the confrontation with our human limitations that this inherently entails — may be among the most crucial skills for thriving in the uncertain, crisis-prone future we all face. […]

At work, the way to get more tasks done is to learn to let most of them wait while you focus on one. “This is the ‘secret’ of those people who ‘do so many things’ and apparently so many difficult things,” wrote the management guru Peter Drucker in his book “The Effective Executive.” “They do only one at a time.” Making a difference in one domain requires giving yourself permission not to care equally about all the others. […]

Instead, you can pour your finite time, energy and attention into a handful of things that truly count. You’ll enjoy things more, into the bargain. My gratifying new ability to “be here now” while running or driving or cooking dinner isn’t the result of having developed any great spiritual prowess. Rather, it’s a matter of realizing I could only ever be here now anyway — so I might as well give up the stressful struggle to pretend otherwise.

— Oliver Burkeman, from “Today’s Superpower Is Doing One Thing at a Time” (The New York Times · July 29, 2023). Burkeman is the author of “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.”