Working outdoors

What struck me as I prepared for bed last night at ten o’clock wasn’t how physically exhausted I was but rather how for once, it seemed justified.

My life, especially my weekday life, especially my weekday life during the school year, tends to be very indoorsy. While it’s true that I go running outdoors 365 days a year –the U.S. Running Streak Association does allow running done on treadmills to qualify for its registry, but in my experience, most streak runners look on that option with contempt – on days the kids have school I’m done with my run by nine o’clock in the morning. And quite often I then sit indoors at my computer for most of the rest of the day. Often this spring Holly and I have gone for a little bike ride after school, and sometimes one or another of my family members will take a walk with me, but for the most part, I spent a lot of my time indoors.

And so sometimes when the typical middle-aged sense of physical fatigue sets in at around ten o’clock at night, I ask myself just what I’ve done to merit the sense of weariness. There were about six years in my life when I lugged children around for much of the day, and there were other phases of my life when I ran between six and thirteen miles some days. When I was in my twenties and living in Boston I walked a mile or so to and from work every day. In college I taught aerobics during the summer. All of those seem like good reasons to be tired at the end of the day in a way that going for a two-mile run and then sitting at my computer does not.

Yesterday, though, I once again had a good excuse, beyond being middle-aged. I’d spent three hours that afternoon helping my father bale and stack hay, which is challenging physical labor, and all of this on a sunny eighty-degree day. I deserve to feel tired, I told myself with a little bit of righteousness last night. I did actual manual labor all afternoon.

We spent the first hour transferring hay bales from the trailer to the barn. That’s a straightforward job that consists of little more than moderate lifting and carrying. The next step was a lot harder. I told my father I’d help him pick up bales from a field he’d already mowed and raked. This was something I’d never done before.

“Is there anything about this job I should know?” I asked him on the way over.

“Stack from the back of the trailer to the front,” he said. “And just do your best to keep up.”

I honestly had no idea what I was in for. Collecting bales involves my standing in the trailer while Dad pulls it with the tractor, which is equipped with a device that gathers the hay up and then catapults tied bales into the trailer. As I stood there holding onto the gate, the trailer rocking back and forth as we crossed the uneven terrain of the field, hay bales flew through the air. After about twenty minutes, I had such bad motion sickness that I had to get out of the trailer and walk. “I’ll pick up any bales that fall out,” I said, feeling fairly useless. Without me in the back, the hay bales still flew through the air and landed in the tractor; they just made a haphazard pattern, whereas previously I had been stacking them neatly.

As I walked through the field, sipped water, and tried to get my sense of equilibrium back, I reflected that I’d probably have either nightmares or a very mild case of post-traumatic stress syndrome from the experience of standing in the rocking tractor while hay bales catapulted toward me. It’s like an amusement park ride for the masochistic, I mused. Try to balance and not get sick while also being really scared by heavy objects flying through the air.

According to my father, my brother-in-law can do this same job while singing and dancing in the back of the trailer. That’s impressive, but we all have our strengths. I had to concede this wasn’t one of mine. Dad was understanding and said it didn’t really matter if the bales didn’t get stacked geometrically, though it didn’t help things any when I then backed the truck up to the trailer too fast and put a crease in the bumper.

All of that notwithstanding, it was good to be working outside for a change. As a writer, I spend far too much time sitting still peering at my screen. Trauma aside, getting outdoors on a hot sunny day to do something productive is a good idea. And I’m willing to try it again, this time knowing that balancing in the back of a rocking trailer while hay bales seem to hail down from the sky is just a normal part of the job.

In the zone

It was a good morning of work. I was crossing To Do items off my list left and right; I was coming up with story leads and tracking them down; I was getting answers from editors. A conference call for which I’d blocked off an hour wrapped up in 15 minutes, with everyone on it agreeing to take on an apparently equal amount of follow-up work. I finished one article, started another, pitched two more. (That’s not being manic; it’s how freelance journalists need to work to maintain a steady flow of revenue.) I called my doctor’s office to ask about scheduling a flu shot, and that wasn’t even something I’d remembered to put on my To Do list. In fact, after I did it, I added it to my To Do list just for the fun of checking it off.

When I looked at the clock on the lower right corner of my computer screen, I discovered I’d been sitting at my desk for less than two hours; it was barely 11:00. With the dog’s deep brown eyes fixed soulfully on me, I promised her we’d get out for a run before noon.

I’m in the zone today with my work, I thought to myself as I headed out.

Being in the zone when working isn’t necessarily about maximum productivity. The times I’ve probably gotten the most work done, in any meaningful way of measuring, is on nights when I’ve stayed up until midnight to meet a deadline and written a couple of thousand-word articles within the space of three or four hours. This wasn’t about getting a huge amount of work done. Being in the zone felt more like equilibrium than voracious speed. I was in balance. I was writing, but I was also networking, responding, liaising, and even taking care of personal and family tasks like scheduling flu shots and starting a load of laundry.

I know this feeling, I thought. It’s like running. It’s like running in the zone, when you’re out on a three-miler or a six-miler or any distance at all and everything feels right. And just as working in the zone isn’t about voracious productivity, running in the zone isn’t necessarily about speed. I’ve had faster runs, especially in road races or when Tim is impatiently urging me along, that didn’t feel nearly as good as some in which everything was simply in balance. When running, being in the zone means I’m dressed right for the temperature, I’m neither hungry nor full, I’m listening to something engaging on my iPod. It means I pass a neighbor or two to wave to along the way, and there’s plenty of daylight left, and I’m not in any rush to get back. Running in the zone happens when my legs feel strong and my breathing is steady and all of it – inside and out, the universe and my biorhythms – all feel as perfectly balanced as a newly inspected postal scale.

The zone is a great place to be, whether you’re working in it, running in it, parenting in it (you know, those days when everyone is happy and getting along, and you manage to make a nutritious lunch that everyone likes). Cooking. Visiting. Hiking. Partying. Meditating. No matter what the activity, there are times when the karma is right and everything feels in tune.

That’s the zone. It’s hard to seek out, harder to attain when you actively seek it. But on days like today, it’s just there waiting for you, open-armed and welcoming.