A Friday Miscellany

Today's post isn't about a thing.  It's a miscellany - a collection of several things from this first day of November, 2013.

The weather has been unsettled the past few days.  Last night warm moist air moved in and we had quite a bit of rain overnight.  The rain brought down a lot of leaves, particularly from the tall tulip poplars, which are one of the first trees to shed.  The lawn was covered with leaves this morning, and the street gutters were filled with piles and drifts where the running water deposited them.

When I left the house, it was 72 degrees, and with the high humidity it was too warm to wear my jacket.  I didn't trust the weather for the rest of the day though, so I stuffed my jacket in my bag rather than leaving it home.

I crossed Dale Drive and headed along the foot path that runs the block between Dale and Highland Drive.  There are a couple of vacant, wooded lots there that provide good cover, and I spotted the two does and fawn that had been out in the neighborhood the morning before.  I watched them watching me for a bit.  I'm sure these are the deer that much our plants, and it's possible that the fawn is one that was born just across our back fence.  I saw it there one day when it was just a tiny spotted thing, first starting to walk.

When I started on again, I watched one of the does quickly disappear from sight as the angle of my path brought a bush between us.  Just a couple of steps, and I couldn't see her even though I knew exactly where she was.  Then I thought - perhaps she moved away - but I retraced my steps and she appeared again, right in the same spot.  This was a good reminder that what I see is not a reliable measure of what is really there.

Just a few steps from the office building door, I felt a cooler breeze and a raindrop hit my face.   By the time I got upstairs and looked out my office window, it was pouring.  Good timing for me, as several folks arriving just a few minutes later got quite a drenching.

The temperature dropped 10 degrees as the front moved through.  By afternoon though, the clouds were breaking up and the temperature rose into the mid 70's.  The trees in Rock Creek Park and out across Northwest Washington have finally turned color.  If we don't get another storm in the meantime, the view from work will be very nice early next week.

I've been thinking about the extent to which my work experience can be described as one or the other of two states.  The first is an action, or "doing" state.  The second is a distracted, drifting, uncertain state. It does seem as though I can identify, at any given time, which state I am in.  They seem to be quite distinct, and to have a clear dividing line between them.

I want to spend more time in the action state.  It is much more energized and productive.  It seems to not matter much what the specific action is, just that there is some active, motivated "doing."   But I too often find myself in the other state.  I think the technology we use is partly to blame.  Reading email can be done in the action state, but more often for me it is a distracted activity.

When I become aware that I'm in the distracted state, I can usually move myself into the action state by taking some specific, even if small, action.  This afternoon I got several tasks done this way, and the day was more productive than it might have been.

I'm interested in identifying the triggers that enable me to slip into the distracted state, so that I can minimize or eliminate them.  One of them seems to be in how I typically react to new, unexpected tasks that arrive in my email or come from a messenger who appears in my door and says "Do you have a minute?"  I need to do more data collection and reflection to figure this out.

I went to the mid-day yoga class at the fitness center in our building.  The regular teacher was out, so Anil, who teaches classes earlier in the week was subbing.  Anil is from Nepal, and learned yoga there.  He has a much different approach than any other teacher I've encountered, and I'm still figuring out how to integrate his teaching into my practice.  He uses some very active warmup movements that are worth exploring more.  These classes, because they are "all levels," are an interesting comparison for me to observe changes in my abilities over time.  A couple of years ago, I was learning how to do "downward facing dog," and now I'm one of the more capable practitioners in the group.  Frequent, dedicated practice does pay off.

The Friday miscellany finished off with another visit to the gym where I met up with Pam, followed by a week-late wedding anniversary dinner before heading home.