Beautiful sounds: Bay of Biscay

 The deep brumming through the walls of my cabin on the way to Gijón in Spain the last night of my journey.

Explore: my phone

I was listening to the interview above about slow productivity. The speaker, Dr. Cal Newport, talked a lot about deep work sessions and time boxing to do uninterrupted work. The Newport and Huberman talked about working or walking without having a telephone or email inbox nearby. 

Newport talks extensively about the futility of trying to do deep work and all the while checking your phone every few minutes. He believes, probably justifiably, that this is a type of wasteful behaviour most of us do engage in. He calls it, pseudo-productivity. No one can produce anything of note when they are constantly moving their attention away from what they are doing.

Over the last years, I've noticed that I am increasingly plugged into my phone. Since the 2016 US elections, I've stopped using Facebook and (now) X. So, it is not any social media sites that are distracting me, but WhatsApp and email.

Since leaving the company, the number of emails has decreased from over 100/day to a few notices from LinkedIn. WhatsApp is the same way. So, even though the volume has been drastically reduced, my unhealthy behavior toward my phone persists.

This is what I want to explore:

1. Start writing emails to friends again
2. Not checking my phone for the first hour of the day
3. At night, have the phone in another room
4. Occasionally, leave the house without the phone
5. During deep work sessions, put the phone somewhere else

I've noticed that many people I know do not answer their DMs immediately anymore. There may be a collective consensus that we are no longer available all the time for everyone, both at work and in private. So, whether this is true or not, I am on board!

When silence sounds like agreement

(This letter is written out of a recent experience. Though the names and details have been changed, the story reflects what many women in technical professions endure.)
 
To a much-needed advocate, Jason,
 
The other day I walked into the common room for a break. You and Max were deep in conversation. It took me a while to realise he was on a rant about how useless women are as technicians.
 
I have spent over forty years of my professional life quietly swallowing such vitriol. There are only so many discussions one person can rise to. No matter how often I have pushed back against men like Max, I always walk away with a bitter aftertaste. Nothing dents the armour of that kind of hatred.
 
Max’s rant went further. He named women who had worked under him, one by one, and gleefully listed what he called their inadequacies. He took pride in having blocked their careers. At first you were silent. Then you laughed. Perhaps it was out of discomfort, but even so, silence and laughter sound like agreement.
 
I considered asking the two of you to stop. What held me back was the knowledge, gained through experience, that Max is not only a misogynist but also a bully. He would have turned his scorn on me and kept at it for days. So, I stayed quiet. Again. That silence is its own kind of cowardice, and it plagues me.
 
Which brings me to the point of this letter. Jason, I have known you to treat your female colleagues with respect. If that is so, could you go one step further? Could you become an advocate? When you find yourself in conversations like this, could you simply say that you do not share the opinion? Could you point out that speaking this way damages reputations and demeans the profession?
 
It cannot be the burden of the few women in the room to fight for equality. The fact that Max could talk for half an hour about “useless” women by name shows just how few women he has worked with, and how many he has made miserable.
 
It is not enough for women alone to carry the burden of calling out misogyny. We are too few, and too often punished for speaking. It is men like you who can change the tone of the room.
 
Please help create a workplace where this kind of talk does not pass unchallenged.

Why I started blogging (and why I haven’t stopped yet)

I wrote my first entry for YumYumCafe at a time when blogging was still in its early bloom. I had contributed to a few other blogs, but eventually I decided to create one of my own. My idea was simple: a place where family and friends, scattered across the globe, could peek into my life.
 
Of course, there were other motivations too. First of all, it was an exciting time in the blogging world. Web 2.0 had arrived, and suddenly people who weren’t professional journalists could publish their own stories. I remember reading first-hand accounts from war zones, or artists peeling back the curtain on their creative process. It felt as though we were being invited to stand like a fly on the wall, watching people make sense of the world in real time.
 
For the first time in my life, I felt part of a wide community. And I didn’t just want to be a consumer or a commenter. I wanted to create.
 
This shift was thrilling. Up until then, the internet had been something you consumed, but blogging opened the door to being a maker. I also had a strong sense that my young children would grow up in a world shaped by this technology, in ways I couldn’t yet imagine. So, it seemed important, even in my small way, to join in.
 
The irony is that my family and friends weren’t the least bit interested in my blog. Not then, not later. But other blogger and strangers were. Over the first decade, I developed deep friendships with some bloggers. Charlotte, for example, became a dear friend, and Ronnie was a kind of mentor for several years. These connections felt more personal and honest than many of the relationships I had with neighbours or colleagues. Back then, people wrote straight from the heart. They weren’t branding themselves or curating their image. Ronnie, for example, wrote about growing old in America, and it struck me as a voice that needed to be heard.
 
Blogging was never without competition. First came MySpace, and then Facebook and the others, which blew the wind out of the sails of the blogging community. For me, the real death knell came when Google shut down its Reader. I had spent years building a library of newspapers, journalists, and bloggers to follow. And suddenly it was gone. I never found a satisfying replacement. Slowly, I stopped following other blogs, though I did keep writing my own for a while.
 
About five or six years ago, when work became overwhelming, my blog began sputtering. I told my family I was thinking of closing it down. To my surprise, both my daughter and my son urged me not to. They said it was part of my artistic legacy, even if they weren’t reading it themselves. (In the meantime, both Julien and Sara do read the blog.) That gave me a second wind. Since then, I’ve been writing more regularly again, and I’ve come to see the blog as part of who I am. Not necessarily what I produce, but the process itself: a daily act of expression. And that is precious.
 
I know Blogger is clunky and outdated, and I’ve often thought about exporting everything somewhere else. But I cling to it, partly out of loyalty, partly out of laziness. Thousands of entries later, it feels like an archive of enthusiasms, obsessions, and half-baked ideas. Sometimes I think I should tidy it up, delete obsolete posts or broken links. But Julien told me to leave them. It doesn’t need to be polished. It is what it is: an ongoing, growing archive of a life lived out loud, in public, with whoever cared to read along.
 
And, against all odds, I think I’ll continue.

How can this be true

 

If I were to paint a sunset, how could I possibly do this justice? Even this photo has not quite caught its magnificence. 

May I never forget this moment.

Beautiful sounds: sunrise

The cacophony of birdsong suddenly diminishing to occasional twirpping the moment the sun rises above the horizon.