Due to various family reasons, I have been working from home for the last couple weeks straight and, haven't really been getting out that much. For the last couple days, the council has been doing some kind of roadworks literally outside our house and it has been difficult to concentrate, as the noise is loud and incessant. I would take some pics, but the weather sucks and it isn't looking pretty, so here are some far prettier (sarcasm) pictures from a construction site a couple years ago.
I still have a headache even though I take painkillers daily and this additional distraction isn't conducive to my working frame of mind, making my already degraded concentration levels, wane even faster - and I am only half way through the day and taking a short lunchbreak. I have never really taken that many painkillers before, as I have tended to take the approach that "pain is good" as it indicates an issue, but since the stroke, it has been necessary. Though, they are pretty mild, so I don't think I am going to end up on the prescription medication death statistics.
Perhaps writing will help me break the pattern and get me back into the work groove faster, though my head is saying "Take a nap. Take a nap". I guess I could shut my eyes for a few minutes and fall asleep to the droning whir and the scraping of steel against rock of the excavators. I can sleep through pretty much anything these days, which is almost a superpower, but one I haven't always had. Until relatively recently in my life (the last 10 years), I really, really struggled to sleep. My head would hit the pillow and my mind would start racing.
I broke the pattern by discovering that the reason my mind raced was that during the day, I wasn't putting in enough mental effort, I wasn't depleting my thoughts enough and my brain had energy and was still looking for work to perform. The head hitting the pillow was the opportunity for it to commandeer control and have the space to process all of the things it wanted to during the day, but hadn't. The reason it hadn't wasn't because I had so much else to do, it was that I was consuming so much passive content that required little thought, that my own mind was massively underutilized.
I was asked on a recent post whether I hear my voice as I write and yes, I do. As I explained, these posts are very much a conversation with myself, where I am lecturer and active audience and it is quite a dynamic discussion. The "audience" part of me likes to run off on tangents and is easily triggered into new thoughts that are unrelated to what the "lecturer" part of me is trying to explain. This is good and bad, as while it makes my writing rambling, it also gives me a steady stream of incoming ideas to work on later. I think both sides get some mutual benefit from the conversation, as obviously, they are intimately connected to each other.
Rathe than being reactive, this process allows me to reflect on life and be directive in how I approach my next decision, as it gives me the space to explore options, even if most of them are discarded as irrelevant or, not related to what I am looking to do at this moment. I actually run an exercise at times with clients where I play a game and have them name as many words as possible on a topic or, one a prefix/ suffix or group of letters. For example, words that start with con- or end in -ing. This creates activation, but on a timer, forces their minds to race, drawing on words that they must evaluate and keep or discard based on whether they fit the rule. They end up with many words discarded, but activated to be closer to draw on later.
These day, I don't have trouble falling to sleep, as my mind is pretty well depleted by the time I get to bed and there is nothing left in the tank. I haven't been getting enough sleep of late though, but I also think that what I have been doing has been pretty useful as well as valuable to where I want to be in the future. At the moment, my mind and body are very much a construction site full of activity, but the plans aren't clear, pages are missing and the foreman is usually AWOL.
Things go wrong all of the time, but overall, progress is being made. This doesn't mean that the results are as expected or hoped for, but at least movement is being made in some direction forward, even if it is slower going and far bumpier than the project team described. Writing about it helps though, as it is like a daily site report and gives a rundown of the day's successes and failures and allows me to evaluate if things could have been done differently. It is a pretty efficient process, the challenge comes in the implementation phases, where I have to actually change something.
At the moment though, it seems that there is a lot of scope creep, as more tasks are continually being added to the list, but very few are being taken away. I am coping and perhaps, it works out better that it is this way, as then I don't have to spend my time dwelling on the things that are affecting me, but I can't affect much directly. For example, I cannot force my brain to improve, all I can do are the tasks required that give it the best opportunity to recover. Past that, it is up to "fate". I don't believe in fate per se, but I do believe that we do not have control over everything we do, so for all intents and purposes, we are bound within a range of potential and possibility, while someone else has a different profile of potential.
At the moment though, fate is dictating that I get back to work on what I am meant to be working on, which requires ignoring the drone of the machines and the calls from the audience, asking to get answers to unrelated questions.
There is always noise in the system.
Some is even useful.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]