Arlington, MA-January 2023

I spent this past week in DC for work. I flew down Monday evening, so I could go to in-person meetings with colleagues and work from our office in Arlington, VA.

I’ve just joined a new project this month; there is so much to be done. The gravitational pull of my work laptop is strong. I spent long hours this week hunched in front of it. Even now, it’s sitting across the room from me on the dining room table. I can see it there, winking at me. “Open me, log in, finish the budget…”

“Later,” I shoot back. “I’m writing right now.”

“Yes, I see that, but you know the budget is due tomorrow and you’ve hardly started. Not to mention you need to prepare your meeting with Val tomorrow at 8:00 am and draft the IEI report,” my laptop replies. “Sure you don’t want to come over here and open me?”

“Later,” I tell it again.

When working, it always seems urgent to keep working. More to be done. Work will fill up all the space it is given, like gas particles expanding to fill a room.

There are plenty of times I do keep working – through lunch or into the evening or in the early morning – because I actually do have to get that budget finished or that meeting prepared or that report drafted. And I’m lucky. I actually love my job and my team.

But the moments I remember most at the end of the week – now back home in Boston with Raja – are those when I snapped my laptop shut, and what I noticed when I did.

8:00 in the morning, arriving to the sun-soaked office before anyone else. Setting my bag down on one of the desks on the 28^th floor of a 31-floor office building in Arlington, VA. It has sweeping views of DC through floor to ceiling windows.

Each day I’d wander over to the window to look at how the early sunlight filters hazily onto the cityscape, turning the Washington Monument and the dome of the Capitol gold.

Most evenings this week I worked late, but Wednesday evening I left work at 5:02pm and hurried down to the metro station around the corner from my office. I took the blue line to McPherson station and then the 14^th street bus to my close friends’ house, across town, to meet their newborn baby.

My friends’ baby was born four weeks ago and is about eight pounds now. He is barely beginning to fit into his newborn clothes. Up till now he’s fit better into preemie clothes, though he was a full term baby.

I like to think that he and I were equally excited to meet each other when I walked in the front door of my friends’ place. I was very excited.

I held him against my chest while I chatted with my friends about how it is being brand-new parents. He felt so light and insubstantial, like he could fly away on a breeze. His skin was papery smooth.

They had me feel the soft spot on his skull, which is surprisingly squishy and feels just like a rotten spot on a melon. He slept most of the time over dinner of salmon stirfry and as we drank red wine and chatted late into the evening, passing him around.

When sleeping and dreaming he made such a variety of facial expressions: worried, with brows puckered, then brows raised as if in a question, then mouth open in a tiny “o”.

Even while working, the moments that I notice and remember are those moments when I was not hunched over my laptop, flying through tasks I need to get done. Normally I work from home, and my colleagues are scattered around the country/world, so the best part about going down this week was spending time in person with the DC-based team and those who had also flown in for the week.

We shared lunches together and drinks after work one evening. Much nicer than spending hours every day on Microsoft Teams video calls. Chatting over lunch or drinks, I got to hear about what motivates them and fascinates them and aggravates them, in and out of work.

After flying back to Boston at the end of the week, yesterday, I went over to see my little 1-year-old nephew. I had work to do, but I ignored it (it was Saturday, after all).

My nephew is also my neighbor, as I’ve written before, and I love that I can walk for only 8 minutes and be at his doorstep. I had lunch with my sister, her husband, two of our friends, and my little nephew, who has just acquired the new skill of waving.

I get a little bolt of joy every time I wave at him, and after a moment (I imagine tiny neurons firing in his brain as he tries to get the movement right), am rewarded with a shake of his little hand accompanied by full on, beaming smile. His whole face lights up with a gap-toothed smile when he waves because he knows he’s doing his new trick.

Work is busy but life is full. I feel the constant push and pull of “Why don’t I take a break?” and “Just need to finish this one thing.”

Do you feel this push and pull?

And what do you notice in the moments when you do take a break from whatever it is you are working on?