Nat

Kathleen Norris’s book “Acedia & me”contains this fascinating sentence, “The goal of ancient and contemporary methods alike [to attack depression and sadness ] is to break the vicious cycle of persistent thoughts” [p. 151]. She is writing a chapter on the usefulness of meditation to disrupt unhealthy thought patterns.

I have meditated on and off since I was 20. I’m in an off-cycle now, and it’s a shame. It’s like being in a period where you are out of shape. You remember what it felt like to take care of yourself, and you wonder when you will get back to it. The restorative power of meditation is that strong. It takes you out of the patterns your own mind uses to make you feel bad.

Norris notes that persistent thoughts–which are usually negative–likely harm you if they aren’t disrupted. I was great at that today. I just couldn’t stay serious, even when my boss looked stressed and frustrated, and I was worried about her. It is getting easier to remember to find something to laugh or smile at or to think of some worthy goal.

Today that was working for me. No bad thought stuck around too long. One of my friends finished a huge project, which her entire department pulled together to do with precision and excellence. It has been a long road for them, almost two months, and they are relieved it’s over and thrilled that everyone thinks they have done so well. I couldn’t stay worried long. There was too much to celebrate.

More and more often, I’m finding that a good day includes successes in more than one area of my life. Today there are four areas to feel great about.

1. Job. I had to pull together a group of 7 people on very short notice to take a meeting with some people who had traveled half way across the country to meet with our company. Many of my colleagues pushed back their own priorities to accommodate the visit. I was grateful, and the company that traveled to meet us was grateful. There is nothing like a spirit of cooperation to make a group of people feel great.

2. Writing. Michael and I spent the late afternoon and evening working on a writing project that we have underway. Michael is great at organizing us, and he put together a chapter schedule for us a few weeks ago. Tonight we realized that we are a few weeks ahead of schedule. So far so good. Both of us have a sense of progress, and I have the satisfaction of not being a source of frustration over lateness. Another double win. I like getting the project done, and I like living up to Michael’s expectations.

3. Christmas cards. I may write an entire blog post on Christmas card writing. It’s often a two-month-long ordeal for me to get all of my cards written. In fact, it’s been 3 years since I finished an entire set. Last year I didn’t write any, though I did leave the stack of cards I received sitting on the floor of my study for 11 months, in case I was inspired to answer them. The great news is that I finally realized I could answer them by starting early on this year’s cards. So starting November 30, I’ve been writing two cards per night, before bedtime, and mailing them in the morning. Tonight I’ll write two more. At this rate, I will have made a good bite out of them by Christmas. Not only will I feel good about reaching out; I will also feel good about cleaning the pile off my floor for the first time since January.

4. Finances. Thanks to my wife, we had some good financial news today. She works hard and is very clever with money. She is always taking the pressure off us with her hard work. So often, I find myself thinking, my wife makes my life so easy and so pleasant.

Oh, and there was actually a 5th great thing. Last night, an old, dear friend of my found me on Facebook. I had been trying to think for a couple of years how to track her down and catch up with her. Last night, lo and behold, there she was in the Friend Requests. I was thrilled and have already swapped notes back and forth with her.

The good news snowballs. I love that any time, and especially this time of year when the days are short, and we’re starting to gear up for winter.

I’m at the airport, waiting for a delayed flight home from Chicago. It snowed here, today, very light flurries, and it made me wonder why I always love the first snow of winter with a full, childlike heart and then come to hate it by mid-winter. This year, I will try to love it for its beauty and take the inconvenience as only a temporary nuisance.

I’m exhausted. True to form, I stayed up past midnight last night working on PowerPoint slides for a customer meeting this morning. Then I got up early to finish them before a planning breakfast with colleagues. Less than an hour before we needed to take a taxi to the client’s headquarters, I had a file mishap and lost quite a bit of my work.

We looked at one another in horror, wondered out loud for three minutes what had happened, and then spread out to fix the problem as quickly as we could. It sounds like a small thing, but when we had regrouped and replaced 4 hours of work in 50 minutes, we all felt a little giddy. Effective collaboration has a way of doing that for me. It is just thrilling to be reminded whom you can count on when you hit a major setback.

The meeting went well, we had lunch and completed our meeting debrief, and then everyone scattered, leaving me alone to catch up on email and some projects I owed to people before heading to the airport.

To my surprise and delight, I finished quickly enough that I had time to swim in the hotel pool. If any of you are ever looking for a great place to stay in Chicago, the Intercontinental Hotel on Michigan Avenue has the most beautiful indoor pool I’ve ever seen at a city hotel. The pool itself is tiled with tiny, mosaic squares. The deep end is nearly 15-feet deep, the room in which it sits is decorated like a modern-day roman bath, and the pool itself is 25-yards long, large enough that a workout feels like a workout.

I swam a little more than half a mile and sat in the sauna for a few minutes before dressing and heading to Midway airport. To make matters even better, Midway’s Southwest terminal has Harry Cary’s restaurant where I ate pork chops, steamed broccoli, and a side of pasta with a basil-fragrant tomato sauce. Absolutely delicious.

So I have to say that the day rewarded me for my patience and hopefulness. My work friends were wonderful this morning, bringing me coffee, offering encouragement, and doing everything they could to help. It was an inspiring way to start the day, and the swim was a refreshing way to end it.

I feel blessed.

Yesterday was a great day at work. A team of us had been asked two weeks ago to meet with a potential customer on a project they were interested in doing. We had only a partial understanding of their goals and preferences, and we were somewhat limited by time.

The most satisfying kind of work for me is when a group of people is thrown together with an objective, and we have to use our best judgment and each of our strengths to get to a quick solution. The less time there is to deliberate, the greater the group focus on what seems like it could work. It keeps me from over-thinking, which I often do given the time.

Our group of six people pulled together some ideas and talked out the pros and cons for four days. By yesterday morning we all had agreed on what the presenters would say. The lead presenter and one other team member helped us pull together the message points, and they talked effortlessly through some recommendations.

I’m not certain yet how it will turn out, but seeing the first stage come together better than our expectations was a lot of fun. I always appreciate being reminded that having faith in our colleagues and the expectation of a positive outcome often ensures that we are moving in the right direction.

The entire rest of the evening was wonderful.

Ok, so it’s a favorite topic of mine, dealing with clutter. I took a big step today dealing with my email inbox. First there was a great article on reducing email inbox clutter in the July 2008 print edition of Macworld. That article further referred to this series of posts at the 43folders.com personal productivity website. This series addresses the psychological reasons for keeping too many emails (the writing is hysterical), and then it offers simple solutions.

Some are practical, including a great sample schedule for how to tackle email in a typical work day so that you aren’t becoming a slave to the new email message notification beep. But my favorite comment is when the author says, Wouldn’t it be great to suck a little less?

That could be a motto for me as I strive to be easier on myself. A lot of my friends are like me in wanting to become more superhuman by trying to do everything. Naturally, none of us can do everything. Those who thrive take stock of themselves, their energy, their time and priorities, and they put their effort where it will make the biggest impact.

So applying these simple guidelines today for scanning and deleting email, I cut the volume of stored messages in my inbox by 800 items. The article calls this getting the piano off your foot. Call it that, or call it sucking a little less. Either way it’s liberating.

I read an article today in which the author wrote that joy is an inherent component of our character, not just the potential to experience joy, but joy itself. We are born with it. It is a divine gift. He went on to say that when we feel less than joyful, we don’t need to work to find some external element to bring us joy (a new job, money, a vacation). We just need to look inside ourselves and remember the joy that is already there.

He went on to discuss working at a job in particular, repeating the idea that to find satisfaction in our work, we don’t need to “do what we like,” we can just learn to “like what we do.” It has the advantage of bringing us quicker relief.

There is nothing new in this, of course. Michael and I read and comment on writers and teachers who, over the course of centuries advised that our answers lie within our minds. We must work to master them. I was just struck today by the idea that our shift in attitude starts by acknowledging what is already there, what is already true.

I came to my office to clean up some of the piles on my desk. I never feel I have time for this on a workday, but today, without the commotion of meetings and emails, I can work at the pace I like best: slowly.

So there’s a trick to liking what I do: find a way to do it slowly. It’s very relaxing. Now if only I can remember that on Monday morning.

Any ideas?

Today was the first day back at work after vacation, and my boss was incredibly gracious and let me work the morning at home before going to the airport. I flew 16 hours yesterday to get from Spokane to Boston (via Phoenix and Las Vegas), and I’m flying back out on business now. So it was a great relief to have my boss give me this flexibility today.

One of the lessons I’m learning from Michael is to appreciate the small blessings that come our way. Today was a perfect example, and I’m heading out on business now feeling great.

My boss also just returned from a trip, and she extended exactly the courtesy she would have wanted her boss to extend her. I love that kind of thoughtfulness. I’m very fortunate to have the boss I do, because this is the way she always thinks. For a long time, I worried about the parts of the job that I found difficult or annoying, and naturally those types of circumstances then magnified in my mind and my experience.

Now I’m working hard to focus on the little things that go well. It turns out to be really easy if you just remind yourself to do it. I’m catching myself being grateful more frequently. Many parts of my life seem better, and I suspect it’s because I am just noticing how much there is to appreciate in my life.

First day back has been great. I’m expecting tomorrow to be the same.

My company is flying me to my favorite place in the world tomorrow, New Mexico. I’m so fortunate that my business travel takes me places I really like. I may even get to see one of my best friends while I’m there, an added bonus.

Granted, business travel is never quite as glamorous as it can look from the outside, but I really appreciate the break in routine that it allows. I do my best thinking in airplanes, because there’s really not much else to do. I love being untethered.

It’s nearly 80 degrees in Albuquerque this week, but cool at night, just the way I like it. I may even have a chance to hike one of the hills outside the city on Friday evening. Another bonus is that the days are so long now.

Anyway. It’s just one of those weeks when I get to be grateful for who I am and what has been given to me.

Another great piece in The New Yorker describes the effects on people with long commutes. The article characterizes people who travel 90 minutes or more each direction as “extreme commuters.” Under this definition, I am just under the limit, thanks to my company’s moving 20 minutes closer to my house last year.

In a nutshell, the article quotes research by several social scientists, which asserts that most long-distance commuters eventually suffer from social isolation for two basic reasons: first, the time they spend commuting is time they can’t spend socializing with their friends, and second, if where a person lives, works, and shops are too far from one another, it’s harder to establish a single community.

The article also points out that humans tend to have a hard time comparing the relative advantages and disadvantages of the material things we gain from a job and the more intangible costs the job inflicts. So we don’t know how to make a healthier emotional choice.

The article made me really sad and anxious, because I’ve been feeling after 10 years commuting more than 30,000 miles a year that I can’t bear to do it any more. Sometimes I think it’s less painful to be ignorant of the imperfections in one’s life, and today, I realized I didn’t want to ignore this frustration any more.

The author also stated that most people stick with a difficult commute not because they love the job, but because they either don’t see an option or don’t have the energy to pursue one. I want to find the energy to have options. Don’t we all?

What’s your secret for storing up that energy?

Flo mentioned David Sedaris yesterday, and I always laugh to the point of exhaustion at Sedaris, especially when he reads his own material. There is nothing like uncontrolled laughter to make you feel good about a day. I know this is obvious.

Still, it’s worth noting any day filled with laughter. Today I went to Ohio on a business trip and had a 2-hour planning meeting with 3 colleagues and 3 staff members of one of our customers. About 30 minutes in, a delightful woman who works for our customer began telling stories about herself. They were self-deprecating and hysterically funny.

We spent most of the next 90 minutes laughing, and we all agreed that it was a very pleasant way to spend a work day. This shouldn’t be rare, and I’m going to do whatever I can to make sure it isn’t. I can’t recommend it strongly enough.