Learning the (woody) ropes

Historic strength
London, ON
December 2018
This photo originally shared on Instagram

Moving into a new building - a house, an office, wherever - is a lot like forging a new relationship. Everything is pristine, wondrous, with new discoveries around every corner. Your first steps are tentative, halting. You don't quite know where you are, where you're going, or how to find the things you both want and need. You're hyper-aware of everything around you, afraid to forget even the tiniest detail lest you need to refer back to it sometime in the future. You feel like what you do now will color what happens down the road.

I've definitely been in hyper-aware mode since we first moved over here. Four weeks in, the space is slowly becoming familiar, and the aimless wandering and looking for where key people sit has started to ease off. But like any relationship, there isn't some magical point in time and space where you're suddenly "there", where you've crossed some kind of imaginary line beyond which you've achieved everything you set out to accomplish.

I see that as an entirely good thing, mind you. Hitting a plateau - in an office, in a relationship, in life, wherever - would be kind of boring, and I can't imagine not feeling that pressure to go further, to open new doors, to learn. When those voices inside our respective heads go silent, the correct response isn't to simply accept the silence. The correct response is to push back, to kickstart the wheels that make those delightful noises in the first place. Hence this photo of what engineering looked like a century before most of us were born.

I'm learning much from this new place, and the people with whom I've been privileged to take this journey. I'm learning to keep looking, keep exploring, keep asking, to stay in hyper-aware mode for as long as I possibly can. Fascinating how a seemingly simple office move can become an analog for life in general.

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