I was recently on a short business trip, and I was sort of dreading the whole trip, including the country of destination. I was aware of this, of course, but was still ashamed of myself when – upon hearing any piece of news related to either the project or the country – I would jump to the irrational conclusion that that might be enough to cancel the trip. Like I said, I was ashamed, but there it was. In the end, there weren’t sufficient reasons to derail the trip and I found myself, plainly and simply, traveling.
Among the coping skills I’ve learned as an adult, I put on a brave face and tried to seem un-phased by this non-turn of events. I believe I was doing this so well that I almost seemed callously indifferent. That is until we were in the car, driving on a sleek highway next to a sweet hillside that was spotted with airbrushes of orange and yellow. Oh my goodness – autumn!! One of my favorite seasons that is beyond brief in my beloved Lebanon, where the leaves don’t linger and fade, they opt instead to just drop at the first sign of wintery weather. I looked again to make sure it wasn’t just a type of boring tree, perhaps a breed that was too lazy to carry full-colour leaves to begin with (you may be puzzled by this notion since, as far as I know, no such tree exists, but that might just describe to you how un-excited I was about visiting this country). By that second look, my cynical callous indifference had all but withered and I found myself goofily smiling at this beautiful hillside holding autumn for me, for me to enjoy.
How ironic, I thought, that it would be this beautiful nature that would make me like this country again. This is when I realized that it wasn’t the first time. I could remember being on a bus from London to Oxford, upset and depressed by the usual gloomy, wet weather, when I looked out at a field with edges that disappeared over the horizon, and seemed to reflect a tinge of lush, rich, deep green onto the otherwise non-descript sky. All I could think of was ‘emerald’, and how, for the length of that field, I felt as if I was inside one.
I thought back to one of my many walks in Sri Lanka, when I would reach the point of saturation with all the dust, sun, heat and shriveled, dried up bark (which would give you the feeling that the sun practically peeled it off the trees and sucked the moist life out of it). Just around then, I would feel a slight, delicate cool, and would look up to find I was walking next to a majestically upright coconut tree, bending just so at the top out of its easy-going and kind shade-y character.
I would think of a perfectly smooth, wavy sand dune in Sharjah’s otherwise lifeless desert where I grew up, of a lake appearing like an oasis beneath the narrow, winding roads somewhere between Sanaa and Taez in Yemen, and so on and so on.
So there it was, a self-realization revealing itself to me for the first time, that it isn’t always my lofty notions of anthropological curiosity, courteous interaction with people, or self-disciplined motivation that keep me connected to places, and thus people. It was something much simpler all along and for which I can claim no credit whatsoever – but I'm happy to take a back seat to nature any day!
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Write, dammit!!
The home page for one of my browsers, the one I use most often, is this blog. I did not do this out of egoism, but rather as a reminder for me to write, write, write. Whereas this reminder was pleasant in the past, it has now become a plainly annoying nag. Why do I do this to myself?
But the truth is that I do miss writing, so I came here today equipped only with my virtual pen and this blank page, with no particular idea, inclination or direction… let’s see where we end up.
I’m in a coffee shop with free wifi, decent music, and a strict non-smoking policy, there are a handful of these around town that have become my makeshift workspaces when I get too restless (and undisciplined) to work from home. I actually do have a cool set-up at home – I custom-designed my desk, have a couple of my favourite Klimts hanging right above to keep me calm and inspired, have broken in my office chair just so, and am at the perfect angle and distance from the air conditioner to remain perfectly cool/warm, depending on the weather. My coffee-shop workspaces have none of these traits, but they all share one feature that is sometimes central to getting any work done: they force me to stay seated. At these coffee shops, there are no TVs and shows that come up and “who knows when they’ll be screened again” (who am I kidding, I know they’ll be back on in 4 hours). There also aren’t any dishes in the sink, or laundry in the hamper that I can suddenly decide to feign a heightened hygiene conscience and feel propelled to clean right this instant. There aren’t any rooms to tidy up, even though they have been comfortably neglected for weeks, or any phone calls to make, or plants to water, and so on, and so on.
No, these coffee shops are the closest type of workspace to my offices. And the procrastination they offer is also quite similar – websurfing, emails, and – wait for it – blogging!
As a matter of fact, there are so many similarities to my previous routine of working in an office that I have begun to doubt my level of productivity during all those years of employment. I mean, was it truly an achievement to respond to around 50 emails a day, playing a virtual ping-pong game of ideas, that take much longer to see tangible fruition sans ping-pong? Did I really need to spend late afternoons writing comprehensive reports that would later be butchered into one-page briefs general enough to be relevant to just about any other project? I’m not sure… I often feel that, at the end of the day, I get things done within roughly the same period of time, but there is much more ‘camouflaged wasted time’ in an office than there is when I call it a day and decide to, say, cook or go for a walk.
What I don’t often get to do, sadly, is just write… The biggest downside of not being in an office and full-time employment is that you never have those lulls where your mind just gets to wander aimlessly and not immediately get roped back in by to-do lists and deadlines. When in an office, there are always some episodes that are just so mind-numbingly infuriating or boring (think back to just about any meeting that has gone too long) that they set my mind free to daydream, and that’s usually when the first lines of a blog entry come to mind. I’ll have to work on creating some daydream episodes, preferably without the infuriation!
But the truth is that I do miss writing, so I came here today equipped only with my virtual pen and this blank page, with no particular idea, inclination or direction… let’s see where we end up.
I’m in a coffee shop with free wifi, decent music, and a strict non-smoking policy, there are a handful of these around town that have become my makeshift workspaces when I get too restless (and undisciplined) to work from home. I actually do have a cool set-up at home – I custom-designed my desk, have a couple of my favourite Klimts hanging right above to keep me calm and inspired, have broken in my office chair just so, and am at the perfect angle and distance from the air conditioner to remain perfectly cool/warm, depending on the weather. My coffee-shop workspaces have none of these traits, but they all share one feature that is sometimes central to getting any work done: they force me to stay seated. At these coffee shops, there are no TVs and shows that come up and “who knows when they’ll be screened again” (who am I kidding, I know they’ll be back on in 4 hours). There also aren’t any dishes in the sink, or laundry in the hamper that I can suddenly decide to feign a heightened hygiene conscience and feel propelled to clean right this instant. There aren’t any rooms to tidy up, even though they have been comfortably neglected for weeks, or any phone calls to make, or plants to water, and so on, and so on.
No, these coffee shops are the closest type of workspace to my offices. And the procrastination they offer is also quite similar – websurfing, emails, and – wait for it – blogging!
As a matter of fact, there are so many similarities to my previous routine of working in an office that I have begun to doubt my level of productivity during all those years of employment. I mean, was it truly an achievement to respond to around 50 emails a day, playing a virtual ping-pong game of ideas, that take much longer to see tangible fruition sans ping-pong? Did I really need to spend late afternoons writing comprehensive reports that would later be butchered into one-page briefs general enough to be relevant to just about any other project? I’m not sure… I often feel that, at the end of the day, I get things done within roughly the same period of time, but there is much more ‘camouflaged wasted time’ in an office than there is when I call it a day and decide to, say, cook or go for a walk.
What I don’t often get to do, sadly, is just write… The biggest downside of not being in an office and full-time employment is that you never have those lulls where your mind just gets to wander aimlessly and not immediately get roped back in by to-do lists and deadlines. When in an office, there are always some episodes that are just so mind-numbingly infuriating or boring (think back to just about any meeting that has gone too long) that they set my mind free to daydream, and that’s usually when the first lines of a blog entry come to mind. I’ll have to work on creating some daydream episodes, preferably without the infuriation!
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