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| Summer fun |
I haven’t been turning up at my desk often
enough lately – not the work desk, that has its own rhythms and strictures. I
mean the home desk, my creative world. I have lost the habit. What can I blame
it on - change of job, the festive season, summer days – all of the above or
none of the above? No doubt the answer lies somewhere in between, and really it
doesn’t matter. The point is to break out, strike out in the direction I want
to go. There are reasons, and there will always be reasons and musing on them
doesn’t change the situation.
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| A quiet mind |
But other shifts that I have been trying to
make have flowered. Several months ago I signed up to a mind/body studio. I pay
a weekly fee and can go to as many classes as I like. After a rocky
start I am averaging two classes a week – one pilates and one yoga. I’d
like to get it up to three but sometimes there just isn’t enough time or
inclination. The change which is less easy to articulate is that I am not
fighting with myself half so much to get there. It is like having set the
benchmark, and having had a bit of practice at meeting it, and missing it, I am
settling into it.
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| A new park |
The job change has also meant a route
change for my walk to work. I am now walking all the way – not walking to the
Vic market and jumping on the free tram for the rest of the journey. My new
route means I don’t have to traverse the city at all. I skirt round the edges
of a park, walk through the university grounds, along fashionable streets to
another park and then arrive at my building. A gentle stroll of 4km, done five
mornings a week is good for me and easy unintentional exercise.
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| Growing time |
All this body work is good for my mental
health. The walking helps warm up my mind in the morning. I can’t be doing
anything else, just looking at the world around me and moving leaves me with
space to think. In the evenings the yoga/pilates helps clear my head. I have to
focus on what the instructor is saying and then try and arrange my limbs and
core into the required position – always remembering to breathe.
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| Light in the dark |
The challenge still remains how to get all
this lovely clarity and creativity to my desk. I know that when I do sit down
something has to happen, because that’s what happens at work. But it doesn’t
happen in isolation. At work there are a lot of external drivers –
expectations, plans, requests. At my home desk this is not the case, in my own
room I have to set these parameters myself. I need a plan. A plan with
sufficient detail that I feel I am not starting with a blank page - a plan that
will lead me to the next milestone, a sense of what the milestones are and a
sketch of where the milestones will lead. Interestingly this is usually how my
blog posts come about. I have an idea, I make an outline of what I want to
cover and a few days later I come back and do a longer write up. The drafting
doesn’t take much time or thinking because the basic concepts and structure are
already there. So I guess I already have my answer – and some practice at using
it!
