t’s hard to covey just how bad my work day was – this is the middle of three days of Program Increment meetings, the hardest one for me. Today my team has to figure out what it needs to do. We have a limited time to task up our board. Management is forcing work on us (regardless of the principles of non-intervention in Agile). And as a scrummaster, I’m running from room to room, up and down stairs, trying to pull everything and everyone together in this shambles of effort over four hours without lunch (well, cold Olive Garden spaghetti) while people keep changing their minds, other people won’t give timely information, and some people are as hostile as junkyard bitch-dogs (yeah, if you know me and my workplace, you know who I’m talking about). Ugh.
So after a long day, 8am to 5pm nonstop, I was dead. People saw me and asked if I was alright. I could only shake my head. But guess what – I’d cycled in today and now I’d have to do it going home. I wasn’t looking forward to this at all.
Decided I’d “Amsterdam-Cycle” home, i.e. take it easy. And that didn’t last long. Within a quarter mile I was pumping along, smiling up at the moon in its darkening sky, just refreshed and enjoying myself. And all along every major road, people honked and fumed and made the world a worse place.
I thought about it in the ride, of this difference. And maybe it’s something like reading books vs reading Twitter or Facebook updates. One of them provides a deep and moving satisfaction, a satisfaction of completion, the general feeling of well-being. And the other is quicker, more convenient but certainly more frustrating and irritating. Yes, you might get a lot read quickly but in the end, you are jittery and on-edge.
So, you need to determine what sort of life will be yours. The bike or the car. The book or social media. Which makes you a deeper, happier person as opposed to someone who is no better off (if not worse) at the end of his “session”?
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go finish my book In the City of Bikes. Watch for the review!