no goals

I’m finishing work this week in Chicago, where I’ve been for the past few months. It’s been a mixed bag, honestly, but I’ve worked with some lovely people and gone from loathing this town to being rather fond of it.

This week I don’t really have any fixed plans, though I came at the suggestion of colleagues who believed we’d get together or meet or something. So I kept trying to make those plans. Last night I extended the idea of daytime work plans to nighttime fun plans and nearly kept myself from having any fun at all.

Today, my last day in the city, one person called me & we went walking in the park. First we kidnapped another colleague. We walked a bunch, played a bit (splishing and splashing in the park also gave us time to talk about our project experience), and wound up collecting yet another person for lunch. Oh, and then we totally reorganized our plans for the evening.

After that, I went to a museum, got a cupcake & ate a taco underground. I made this great plastic dinosaur at the museum!

this little machine made me this brontosaurusy thing at the field museum

This unplanned day has turned out both more fun and more productive than any of my planned efforts this week. Conveniently, someone also emailed me this Zen Habits post about just that: life without goals and objectives.

It’s often pleasant to have conversations about the future and what a good one might look like, but I think he’s right about at least the shortest of terms.

travel broadens the mind

I am awake at 3am local time, which is a little annoying. If I could, I might poke my internal clock in the eye.

This is the thought I woke up with: when did I stop using plastic baggies? My home airport keeps an enormous box of them just outside the security line, and I picked up the second plastic baggie I’ve acquired in a year as I left on this trip. I think at some point I decided that, whatever I was doing with regard to plastics, at least I wouldn’t willfully buy small plastic bags to transfer things out of larger plastic containers. As for the small plastic containers used to transport toiletries in carryon luggage… well, those are pretty easy to reuse, at least. Except for toothpaste. [Well, people have suggestions, but how many pairs of scissors does one household have?] Yet another argument for finding a toothpaste recipe that doesn’t taste awful, or like dessert.

There are other ways traveling shows – and perhaps creates; cause and effect are pretty subtle sometimes – the changes I’ve wanted for myself over the past mumble mumble years. I packed – as I’ve been telling everyone – one large carryon bag & a laptop (in a bag that will also be my purse and walking bag) for a week. This is going to be my new standard for work travel, so it may as well be my standard everywhere. One Bag is right, though: if you’re doing a single bag, wheels are a bit stupid – they’re heavier, and a bit unwieldy even in airports. Noted.

Bag logistics aside: I forget sometimes that I was once given to impressive meltdowns when forced to travel. The first time I went to Hawai’i, I cried at a Starbucks in LAX – before we even got there. And possibly again at a rental car counter in Honolulu? My poor travel companion! I finally left the US for a bit this year, in part because I gained a sense of humor and let go of that overwhelming need to have things happen according to plan. Nothing ever goes exactly according to plan. Which is great! That’s where the real fun starts.

Partly, also, I think I used to be afraid of… well, anything that wasn’t familiar or comfortable. Forcing myself to deal with new degrees of discomfort helped get me over that. In fact, as I try to list examples, none of the things that should sound uncomfortable actually are – I mean, sure I’ve camped in 100 degree heat, but there was a shower and a swimming hole; or there were those there-and-back-in-a-day job interview flights, but the tacos were fantastic; getting up to the tip of that mountain was hard, but it was amazing and only took like an hour and a half anyhow. The more I think about it, the more I feel like I need to do scarier stuff. My stuff just isn’t that scary. But. It sure would’ve seemed that way to the version of myself who melted down at LAX that one time.

And the tacos really were fantastic.

hard habit to break

Earlier this week, I started looking around the house at things I leave plugged in, with a mind to reducing energy consumption. I’ve trained myself to turn off lights, so presumably unplugging laptops and phones and stuff when they’re not in use should be easy.

Strangely, it’s not. I’m not even going hard core with this – I mean, the microwave and the teevee are still plugged in, and those are sucking down power, too. [Now that I think of it, why isn't the teevee unplugged? I only turn it on every few days.] Detaching phone from charger and putting in in purse is an almost-unconscious gesture. Apparently the second gesture (“yank plug from wall”) just needs to be learned.

things i can live without

I told a few of my fellow coaches at training this past weekend about my dream of this different life. It felt like they wouldn’t disapprove. Beautiful thing about coaches: they want people to be happy and fulfilled. They’ll support any way you choose to do that.

In practice coaching, I committed to someone to write a list – two lists, actually – of things I can live without and things I can’t sacrifice.

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horse before cart

Today’s small victory is payday. I’m making a commitment to shop for non-grocery items only at the end of pay cycles rather than at the beginning.