In Zen philosophy, emptiness is an important virtue. Voids set the space for transitions. What defines a beautifully laid garden and sets it apart from the jungle are the empty spaces between the trees. In a similar vein, the human spirit also periodically needs time to dwell into nothingness, to arrive at nowhere, and to have no pursuit. While solitude is best discovered in remote places such as mountains and deserts, surprisingly, similar moments may also be found amid busy city roads when driving a car.
Every day, it takes about 45 minutes for me to drive to work in the morning traffic and about the same time to drive back. Most people dislike the long commute time, especially during peak traffic hours. I am a Type-A personality, and people with this trait have a constant sense of hurriedness and urgency to finish tasks. For an impatient person like me, the pace of the world slows down tremendously when cars move inch-by-inch. Surprisingly and contrary to my nature, I have thoroughly enjoyed my driving time and it has been the only time when I have not been impatient! It is my “me-time” when I listen to my favourite songs and think about virtually nothing.
COVID-19 forced all of us to home confinement and most organisations encouraged work from home. I too was balancing work from home and work at home (including my children’s homework!). Like most others, I experienced confusion, anxiety, fear, stress, and even momentary brain fog. I missed my physical workspace and colleagues but what I was missing the most was my driving. I realised how much my driving time helped me ‘unwind’. Those 45 minutes of driving time in peak traffic helped me smoothly transition physically and mentally from my personal to professional role and vice-versa. This driving time temporally demarcated these two major aspects of my life; thus, maintaining a delicate balance popularly called work-life balance.
In the new normal, the boundaries between work and home have blurred. How can mummy concentrate on work when the baby is crying? How can a toddler understand that daddy has to shut the door to conduct a virtual meeting? Too much screen time is bad; nevertheless, most of us are glued to our screens to work, often during the early hours and beyond dinner time! Is this the ‘new normal’!? Personally, I don’t like this term. This ambiguity in life does not sound normal and I hope that it does not become the new normal. But companies’ announcements seem to advocate work from home even post-pandemic. So what do we do in times of unprecedented crisis (and thereafter) which upsets our normal life?
Driving time
Find your driving time — I don’t mean that you physically step into your car and start driving (You could do so if you like though!). Rather, consciously treat yourself with mindful breaks. Breaks that unwind you. These breaks should be the refresh button for your mind. They should reboot your system with positive energy so that you carry out your personal or professional activities with mindfulness. Due to the lack of physical set-up that differentiates home and work, as you work from home, these mindful breaks can help you achieve that sense of balance which seems to be missing.
Since the onset of COVID-19, newspapers began publishing articles underscoring the need to establish a daily routine to work from home effectively. While designing a routine is a good-to-have solution, it is quite difficult to achieve it pragmatically. Homeschooling, elderly care, your work, your spouse’s work, and household work without domestic help, all going on in parallel daily. So practically, a 9-5 routine may not be of much help. Rather, what may help to integrate your work and life is mindfulness. Be conscious of your personal life and its demands, be conscious of your professional life and its demands, and be conscious of the breaks that you take. These breaks must be guilt-free, must calm your senses, and must rejuvenate you. These moments spent in nothingness should help your brain transition smoothly from personal to professional life and vice-versa. These mindful breaks will thus help alleviate stress, clear the brain fog, and enable you to achieve the delicate balance and integration in your personal and professional life.
So are you ready for a mindful drive?
akanksha.jaiswal@liba.edu
