My Creating a Life Worth Living book continues to impress me with its insight and delight me with its activities. I’m not certain why it’s so interesting; it makes you delve into ideas about your work and your passions that I’ve not experienced before. I guess I just like an excuse to explore what interests me, and Lloyd has created a way to do that that seems organic and open. I like it a lot.
I think one of the things I really like about the book is that Lloyd encourages you to go ahead and write out whatever crazy, wild, improbable or impossible dream that you might have and that’s okay, because it doesn’t have to serve a particular purpose or lead to something practical. That’s very freeing for me. I always hated the phrase in writing workshops about “giving yourself permission” to write about something because it sounds so New-Agey and touchy-feely and self-helpy; turns out I guess I do kind of need permission to allow myself to just dream or write down whatever comes to my mind without it being sensible or leading to a tangible product.
One of the last exercises asked you to write down activities you enjoy doing (tasks), environments you like to work in (contexts), and fields that interest you (content); you then poked about to see where these areas intersected and the kind of ideas that generated.
I did fairly well on all of them, I think, but it turns out that I’m really good at envisioning my ideal working environment, down to minute detail. I thought I’d share my ideal workspace with all of you, in case you want to build it for me or anything:
We see a forested mountainside, thick with pines and firs, dappled with oak and maple. Wind gusts between the trees at intervals, shaking the branches; overhead, the sky is roiling with thick gray clouds which occasionally dip down to stream up the hillside and coil between the trees. The occasional snowflake drifts down in the dim gray light.
Nestled in the forest is a small gambrel-roofed wooden cabin of dark wood; you can just spy one window in the upper story and a corner of the roof between the boughs. A small footpath leads over a stream and to the door.
The door creaks solidly when opened. When you step inside, you are met with the mild scents of aged wood, leather, pipe tobacco, woodsmoke and coffee. A small mudroom leads into a tiny kitchenette. A small counter, white sink, mini refrigerator (inside of which you’ll find eggs, good cheese, butter, milk, and sausages), and a tiny antique stove are surmounted by cabinets holding a few plates, mismatched coffee mugs, and utensils. Just beyond is a tiny bathroom.
Everything in the cabin is rustic and old. To the right is a narrow wooden staircase that leads up to the second story; just beyond is a small sitting area with a comfortable overstuffed love seat and two chairs around a squat, thickset wooden coffee table, for those days when my collaborators and friends drop in for a lengthy chat about life, theology, and art. The floor is wood with a richly colored but faded throw rug. Bookshelves can be found on the walls, crammed with works of every variety: histories, science texts, novels, literary magazines, atlases. An iron wood stove sits in the far left corner and radiates a warmth; a tea kettle sits on its round top, simmering gently. The floor creaks as you walk over the boards; the sound of the wind whistles around the eaves, making you grateful for the warmth inside.
In the back wall is a door; opening this reveals the only “modern” room in the cabin, a small recording studio. A small counter sports a couple of simple office chairs looking through soundproof glass into the black recording booth. This contains a good recording set-up with a condenser mic on a boom stand and a comfortable modern high-backed office chair. Another small counter can be found in here, for a laptop computer, and there are connections for ISDN and DSL lines.
Upstairs is the writing room. The roof slopes down on both sides, and a small window is set at either end. At the far end is the window that looks out over the valley. Two high-backed fabric wing chairs sit to either side, affording a view to the wilderness below with no signs of human habitation evident (or, if they are, they are distant and innocuous). A corner of the main log house can be seen if you look out the window to the far left.
The center of the room has a single well-worn couch, a standing lamp, and small wooden end-table, well scarred from coffee cups and wear. A few small pillows are scattered about. Across from the couch are a pair of squat bookshelves that fit under the roofline; these have only reference books and a very few favorite novels and books on writing (so as not to distract me by wanting to sit down and read something new). Another, smaller wood stove is tied in with the pipe from the first here.
At the end facing the hillside is a simple antique wooden desk with a small desk lamp. In the drawers are several dozen mechanical and regular pencils and various styles of fine-tipped pens, along with reams and reams of paper. A printer can be found in a rolling cabinet to the side. A high-backed leather office chair rests in front of the chairwell; out the window is the medium-vista view of the hillside rising up, with branches crowding scene. Heavy sack curtains hang on either side of the window. A few small figurines or knickknacks might be found on the desk, but it is essentially clear, awaiting a sheaf of papers or the laptop brought upstairs; distractions are minimal.
So there you go. Anyone want to come visit?
Actually, I’d be delighted for folks to leave a description of their ideal workspace in the comments here. What would you design for yourself given unlimited funds and opportunities? I think it might say a lot about us and the associations we have with our chosen/desired lifestyle. What think you?
3 comments:
I think that your discription of the perfect work place is my discription of the perfect home. Warm and well-worn. You even rubbed all the hard edges off the weather (dude, move to NW already).
My only changes would be to scrap the recording booth and update your sad little kitchenette. 6 burners, convection oven, and a decent set of knives please! Speaking of which, I gotta go wash some dishes. *Sigh*
Hey, thanks for the pics of Miss Pretty-Pretty. We got the "announcement" Tuesday. She adorable. Congrats!
Wow. Yes. I would be quite happy to find some way of living there, as well.
My changes would be necessitated by my needs: a large white drawing desk (basically a drafting table with a hinge that allows me to elevate the angle of the tabletop) with a craning flourescent light and a sturdy tray on the side to hold various pens, pencils, erasers, brushes, and a place to put vials of india ink. Probably best to have some kind of wooden end table to keep more tools in within reach. A comfortable drafting chair that provides ample lower back support.
There would need to be a computer somewhere nearby, with a scanner large enough to accomodate 10" by 15" artwork, and DSL, of course. A photocopier and a light table would complete the set.
Finally, there would need to be a series of bookshelves upon which I could place my various reference books and comics. This should probably be in a closet, both to keep clutter away and to prevent me from being too easily distracted by my own collection.
Now, as to my wants:
Ideally, this room would have a large window looking out into the forest, though I haven't decided on which side of me I would like it to be (or whether I would like it to be in front of me, behind my desk, so I would behold the view every time I looked up.
There would need to be a CD-playing stereo in the room, as well, and a rack in which I can store my collection of movie soundtracks, appropriate to the various moods and genres of books I would be working on at any given time. Half of the time, the sound of the birds or the wind outside, or the ticking of the clock would be all the ambience I would need.
A clock should be somewhere in the cabin - a large clockwork affair like the ones at my parents' house, with weights on pulleys, a pendulum, a rotating face which shows day and night, and Roman numerals. It chimes once every fifteen minutes.
I was tempted to trade the wood stove for an actual fireplace, though perhaps the wood stove is wiser.
I would like it to be sunny and clear on at least as many days as it was stormy and foggy. The occasional thunderstorm would also be nice, provided it didn't knock out the power too often.
Ours is an old school. Most of the classrooms, I've heard, were military offices from the 1940's. The walls are rock-hard, and there isn't much wall space on which to display things so that they'd be clearly visible. Ideally, a classroom would have walls that could be covered from floor to ceiling with diagrams, writing aides, spelling words, student work, and such. Furthermore, dust gathers easily around the rooms, and they have a bit of a stale, old-building smell. It’d be nice, of course, to have new, clean rooms. It’d be nice to have windows without graffiti scratched into them. Ideally the windows would be big, and would look out on something nice. A remote forest would not be possible, of course, but a little garden would be good.
The layout of the rooms is also a little odd. They stretch far to the right and left, but don’t have much depth. My ideal classroom would have plenty of space for a nice library, reading center, and listening center, a nice area to have students sit while I read books, and such. The layout of these rooms is not horrible, and I’m able to make some of the above things work, but it could be better.
Let’s see…. What else?
Well, it’s not really part of the environment, but it would be nice to have a teacher’s assistant, at least for part of each day. Most of our teaching is done through direct instruction, and I don’t get much time to sit down. It’d be nice to have someone to score papers, and record the grades. They could help with creating diagrams and posters, and in working with those few kids struggling with a lesson, so that the bulk of the class could move on. That would be nice.
There are many things about our classrooms that I like quite a bit, and would not change. For example, each room has a sink in it. That’s very handy. We have four computers in our classroom. Those would have to stay. There is a very good selection of reading books in my classroom library, and they are all leveled so that students can easily find a book they can read, or take a quiz on. My projector is very cool—not the boring old overhead. It’s a “smart” projector. You can put anything (provided it fits) on top of it and instantly project it to the front. I project worksheets, storybook pages, math manipulatives, and all sorts of other things to the whiteboard at the front of the room, and then model work over them. Gone are the days of making overhead transparencies. Overall, our administrators have done a very good job of giving us what we want to make our school a pleasant place to work.
Of course, I’d like my room to be well-organized, so that I could find things very easily. The fact that it is not is my own fault, though. I roved into another second-grade teacher’s room last month. She had everything very well organized. She’d even labeled all of her drawers with the names of the supplies that were in them.
Hm…
Ooo. I’d like to have a stereo system with speakers at different locations around the ceiling so that quiet music could be played evenly throughout the room during writing and independent work times.
And I’d like a huge drum of sharpened pencils to be placed on the roof of the classroom, with a little portal leading to a dispenser in the room. Tractors could come by and dump huge scoops of sharpened pencils into the drums periodically, so that the supply would be virtually endless. That would be great.
Post a Comment