At 14:58 10/1/01, Ken Norton wrote:
[snip]
What is one to do? Sulk? Get bummed out? No. I changed the
pictures in my cube. I have put up pictures that I've taken in
years past of the very places I would want to be right now. In
my mind, I'm taking a proxy vacation to those very locations. I
can close out the sights and sounds of the office environment
and hear the sound of a breaze through the trees, water falling,
and the crunch of leaves under foot. I can smell the fresh air.
I am surrounded by creatures both great and small rustling in
the leaves and preparing for the upcoming winter.
As I type this, I am transported to a small stream in the Cosby
corner of the Smokey Mountains. I am sitting on a rock watching
the water flow down through a five foot drop. I can sit here
for as long as I want. I'm in no hurry to hike back down out of
the forest before dark. It doesn't matter that it's drizzling
as I'm dry and warm. The feelings, emotions, and memories of
that time have returned to give me a satisfaction during these
trying times. I have temporarily escaped current reality.
[snip]
Some of the very same reasons I have a few large prints hanging in my
office. It brings some of the outdoors where I've spent time in the past
to the indoors where I must spend time for "$$" if I want to spend more
time in the outdoors. An office without something aesthetic is too
sterile; it's as if nobody lives there. I would venture that most of us do
not work just to work; it's almost always to enable other things in
life. Only a very few reach Abraham Maslow's pinacle of "self
actualization" in which the two are inextricably merged together.
In addition to seeing them as a "proxy vacation" you can also see them as
one of the goals you will eventually attain.
-- John
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