Exploring the Neighborhood

I love working from home. Now that it's spring and starting to feel like it, I can throw the windows open and enjoy the fresh air. I can make the interminable and innumerable conference calls pleasant by either making the kitchen counters spotless or by standing on my deck with the cordless phone and catching some rays.

There's a downside - it's much harder to make the separation between work and the rest of life when you don't have that commuting boundary. But that same blending of work and everything else occasionally works in the other direction too.

Tuesdays are usually a little rough: an 11PM meeting Monday night and then a 7AM meeting Tuesday morning. By lunch this Tuesday, I needed a break, so I laced up the walking shoes and headed out with my iPod and camera.

Walking around on foot and in the daytime, I get a very different view of my neighborhood than I do whizzing past in my car. The man with a stroller in the nearby gardens. The woman grading papers on a park bench. The women volunteering their time to plant and protect seedlings. The couple having coffee. And my favorite, the guy promoting his new pizza restaurant by tossing pizza crust in the parking lot.

As I wander, I imagine these people's lives. What would it be like to have important things to do out and about in the world (instead of in an office) during daylight hours? What would it be like to have nothing particularly important to do during daylight hours? What would it be like to live in the cute little house surrounded by parklands, with big windows upstairs and a little red grill tucked onto the patio in the back?

I may not be able to answer most of those questions, but my pizza dinner that night was amazing.