Hakuchi Moya
Having an excellent summer so far, and this heatwave is kicking my butt, but I love it. The last 3 days have averaged highs of 101° F; I feel like a medicine man in a sweat lodge on a vision quest.
This year on October 2nd (Gandhi’s birthday) I’ve worked for Eaton for 5 years, and I only just came to terms with the fact that my job is nuts. It is over-busy all the time, but I love it. It’s interesting. It’s challenging. It stretches my mind every day, and it is unpredictable. And it’s cool. I work with metallurgy and engineering and unusual manufacturing processes making complex stuff, as well as auditing and solving all kinds of weird problems. And not least, being the last set of eyes and authorizing the release of parts which are about to be installed on aircraft engines. I ‘m responsible for compliance to a gazillion customer specs, the application of lab / materials testing, and demonstrating this compliance to some pretty thorough auditors. I don’t usually talk about the details of work, but I felt like it today.
Some days it gets stressful, but I recently stopped taking on the emotional weight of what is happening, and instead started really focusing on just one thing at a time with a deliberate indifference. We work with some tough customers and have gone through plenty of tough days, but I started to muse over what constitutes “tough days”, and was kind of surprised.
Tough is entirely relative to how much pressure you put on yourself, and is reliant on you categorizing it as “tough”. Unless you do that, nothing is tough. If you remove the classification from things, such as good things and bad things, then you’re just left with “things”.
Things by themselves aren’t that stressful or abusive, and they all carry the same weight - which is amazingly light. And so through several challenging days this last 2 weeks, I made a conscious effort to strip the titles and qualifiers off all the good things and bad things and difficult things and mundane things, and the results were phenomenal. All that remained were two factors:
1 - A bunch of stuff I had to work on, and 2 - a priority list determining the order in which the stuff needed to be addressed.
I suddenly had a ton more headspace, and was able to do a better job of each thing. I didn’t carry any fake weight, and I suddenly freed up about 50% of my energy. I didn’t get emotionally involved in anything (as you naturally tend to do when you care about your work), and everything became much easier. I freed up the resources to apply more of myself, more concentration and focus, and there was another side-effect which I didn’t expect. I achieved way more than I usually do. I didn’t rush through anything just because there was lots to do. I didn’t do anything different really, other than just shrug off all the circumstantially-imposed weight, and stroll from one isolated thing to the next. Sounds simple, but holy crap, it was amazing.
My php / MySQL programming quest has been going very well too, since I started getting some early nights and getting up around 5. My mind works best first thing in the morning, and having a couple of hours of Zen prior to heading into the fray is beneficial. I’ve been drinking more water than ever, eating more fruit, taking more time out for nothingness, and all of this is really working - I feel good.
And tonight, I’m going to a 13th Warrior Party, to drink mead out of horns.
This year on October 2nd (Gandhi’s birthday) I’ve worked for Eaton for 5 years, and I only just came to terms with the fact that my job is nuts. It is over-busy all the time, but I love it. It’s interesting. It’s challenging. It stretches my mind every day, and it is unpredictable. And it’s cool. I work with metallurgy and engineering and unusual manufacturing processes making complex stuff, as well as auditing and solving all kinds of weird problems. And not least, being the last set of eyes and authorizing the release of parts which are about to be installed on aircraft engines. I ‘m responsible for compliance to a gazillion customer specs, the application of lab / materials testing, and demonstrating this compliance to some pretty thorough auditors. I don’t usually talk about the details of work, but I felt like it today.
Some days it gets stressful, but I recently stopped taking on the emotional weight of what is happening, and instead started really focusing on just one thing at a time with a deliberate indifference. We work with some tough customers and have gone through plenty of tough days, but I started to muse over what constitutes “tough days”, and was kind of surprised.
Tough is entirely relative to how much pressure you put on yourself, and is reliant on you categorizing it as “tough”. Unless you do that, nothing is tough. If you remove the classification from things, such as good things and bad things, then you’re just left with “things”.
Things by themselves aren’t that stressful or abusive, and they all carry the same weight - which is amazingly light. And so through several challenging days this last 2 weeks, I made a conscious effort to strip the titles and qualifiers off all the good things and bad things and difficult things and mundane things, and the results were phenomenal. All that remained were two factors:
1 - A bunch of stuff I had to work on, and 2 - a priority list determining the order in which the stuff needed to be addressed.
I suddenly had a ton more headspace, and was able to do a better job of each thing. I didn’t carry any fake weight, and I suddenly freed up about 50% of my energy. I didn’t get emotionally involved in anything (as you naturally tend to do when you care about your work), and everything became much easier. I freed up the resources to apply more of myself, more concentration and focus, and there was another side-effect which I didn’t expect. I achieved way more than I usually do. I didn’t rush through anything just because there was lots to do. I didn’t do anything different really, other than just shrug off all the circumstantially-imposed weight, and stroll from one isolated thing to the next. Sounds simple, but holy crap, it was amazing.
My php / MySQL programming quest has been going very well too, since I started getting some early nights and getting up around 5. My mind works best first thing in the morning, and having a couple of hours of Zen prior to heading into the fray is beneficial. I’ve been drinking more water than ever, eating more fruit, taking more time out for nothingness, and all of this is really working - I feel good.
And tonight, I’m going to a 13th Warrior Party, to drink mead out of horns.