Tag: Work

Tuesday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn32 Comments

img_0019

Epiphanies aren’t lightning bolts. They are a hummed note, a prayer mumbled constantly, brought to the surface given the right conditions. It’s as if I am always hearing three ways, first shallowly, collecting, then one level deeper as I’m processing, and finally, I am hearing with my body, which is when I’m hearing myself. That’s one way, for me, information combines with experience and becomes knowledge. I wish there were a shortcut.

— Stephanie Danler, Stray: A Memoir (Knopf, May 19, 2020)

Notes: New York Times Book Review on “Stray: A Memoir” – “In ‘Stray,’ Stephanie Danler Asks How a Victim Becomes a Perpetrator

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn25 Comments

I want to reinstate a respect for soil. We must touch the soil. How many times do we touch our mobile phone every day? Maybe 100 times. How many times do we touch the soil? Hardly ever. We must give dignity to peasants, farmers and gardeners. We are all part of this healthy web of life maintained by soil. The Latin word humus means soil. The words human, humility and humus all come from the same root. When humans lose contact with soil, they are no longer humans.

– Satish Kumar, from “The Link Between Soil, Soul and Society” (The Guardian)

Notes: Quote via Liquid Light and Running Trees. Photo – Soil by Alexandra

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call?

Live & Learn33 Comments

And what a wonderful thing that artifice can be. Now that we are all working from home, amid the children, the toast crumbs and the laundry, we are realising that the pretence of an orderly life at the office is also a liberation. It allows each day to have its own architecture, its rhythms of departure and arrival. Putting on a perfectly ironed silk shirt or a crisp suit and leaving the house may be contrived but it is also, says Kellaway, “one of the beauties of working life…It allows us to be a different person. And we’re all so fed up with who we are, the opportunity to be someone else, someone a little bit more impressive, is just so tempting.” When such an escape is denied us, that allure may only grow.

— Catherine Nixey, from “Death of the Office” in The Economist (June/July 2020)

 

T.G.I.F.: It’s Been A Long Week

Live & Learn13 Comments

Go wreck yourself once more against the day

and wash up like a bottle on the shore,

lucidity and salt in all you say.

— David Mason, from “Another Thing,” Sea Salt, Poems of a Decade: 2004-2014

Notes: Poem via The Vale of Soulmaking. Photo: (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)

WFH: Week 3

Live & Learn51 Comments

Thursday morning.

Work-From-Home Week 3. I think. Days merging together. Shelter-in-Place. Work-in-Place. Work 7 x 17.

I miss my commute. Miss my 30 minutes of quiet time in the car. Miss my 60 minutes of reading time on Metro North.

First conference call of the day. I step away from the call to grab dental floss. Multi-tasking WFH style.

I adjust the wireless headset, and focus back on the call. Tense. I catch myself grinding my teeth. A night (and now day) grinder. He warned me. After each check-up for years. “DK, you should consider a mouth guard. A retainer.” Nope. This Insomniac is not going to roll around in bed at night gagging on plastic.

Back to the call. I lean forward on the desk, and wrap up the call. I summarize the next steps and as I’m about to thank the group, my bridge loosens, and tumbles down my mouth, then my throat.  I gag, eyes water, I spit the bridge out onto my desk. My thank you comes out Thunkkkkk. Stunned by the chain reaction, I disconnect the line.

My tongue, an anteater, desperately searching for teeth, finds none. Cool air, laps the soft gums, fills the void.

Not the COVID-19 disruption that I anticipated.

Next morning. He agrees to take me in, my dentist. He opens his closed office. No assistants, a one-man band. Air suction, water syringes, sputum splashing from my mouth, onto his googles, onto his shield. 1 hour it took, reconstructing the breaks, putting Humpty back together again.

He walks me out to the door.

My tongue passes across the ivory of my front teeth. Smooth.

I bite down. The Bite, in line.

“Thank You Doc. You didn’t need to come in.”

I open the door, walk down the empty hallway leaving him behind me as he shuts down the office.

Thank you Doc. Thank you.

Inspired by: “And so I remind myself: my real challenge right now is a spiritual one. In the midst of an evolving, unprecedented crisis, can I truly practice living moment to moment? Can I take on this strange new life day by day, from a place of tender awareness rather than fear? Can I let go of the ways I thought life would unfold and save my strength to swim with the tide? Can I stay focused on what’s good, right now?” ~ Katrina Kenison, from “The gift of an ordinary day”