a story from work when i was doing, not learning

I enter details about archival materials into a database at my job.  To do this I use my fingers, my eyes, and a very little bit of my brain to take me through a rhythmic, repetitive process with multiple steps that don’t work if they don’t proceed in the correct logical order.  Click, type a number, click, click, look at the folder, another number, click, caps lock off, look at the folder for the title, shift-and-type, repeat, click, click, caps lock on, enter the library call number which gets stored in my short-term memory for the next 100 reps or so, click, turn to physically slide that folder down in the box and slide the next up, return to home position.  That is one repetition.

This may be good and right work for a person to do or it may not be.  I am not trying to decide about that just now, but I do think about whether or not I do it well.  There is an elegance to getting it just right.  It has to be light, and quick, and smart and accurate.  It’s not so good if my thoughts go to other things while I try to do this; I can’t follow the flow of all the steps.  It’s also not good if my fingers aren’t awake.  They have to move so exactly to the right place to type with any speed.   Another pitfall is to go slow enough to think through and double-check each step.  When I do that I lose the sense of flow, and what’s worse, I begin to think again, now thinking about how slowly I’m working, and how I’ll never catalogue all the files, and whether it is even a worthy project, and why I am doing it, and about what is good or not good for me to do.  And with each thought I become more weighed down until I am slogging through key after key, and everything becomes an awful miasma.  Then I realize, it is cold in these libraries.  And I start to think about snacks.

But when I go just quick enough, the numbers and syllables seem to slide straight from my eyes to my fingers.   Rather than doing acts of data entry, I enter into a state within which entering the data is all I do.  This feel silly to say, but it becomes pleasant.  I might even say my body feels pleasure and I’m less aware of cold, or hunger, or tight muscles.   For a time it is self-sustaining.  What a relief–I’m really not thinking.  I am just in an experience which flows and which I trust will stop itself when I grow tired.

I was in just such a state yesterday.  Another thing about this state is that the folder titles have to be stored in my short-term memory for a second each.  If I get too interested in what might be inside a folder, I’ll stop and read it, but see above about what happens when I go too slow.  It can be deadly.  When I don’t stop to read, there is still a conversation, above and through the physical rhythms of the data entry, between me and the words I’m reading.  Yesterday among the words were, “Warren Lamb – How to Choose a Manager”, and “Efficiency in Movement” and “The Flow of Work”.

How fortuitous–this box was full of archives from Laban’s work with work, in which he analyzed movement of workers to help them find the personal flair in movement which would allow them to work most efficiently and happily.  As I understand it, this analysis was about the qualitative or holistic aspects of movement, which is now what, in dance is practiced as Laban Movement Analysis.  (Different than Laban Notation).

I kept up the keystrokes without stopping to read the files again.  But the title of the folders streamed past, drawing out  associations.  I couldn’t help but smile; the thing Laban was going for with those German and then English workers was the thing I was experiencing right then in my state of work.  I continued.  How lucky, how much fun.

So it was lucky, and fun, and neat to run into the ideas I “work” with–but while working.  The ideas themselves can become so tiresome!   Discussing them, framing them, writing sentences that become paragraphs that become papers–and then abstracts for the papers.  Then, telling the other paper writers about my papers, patiently listening to them about theirs. . . I get weary.  The data entry is so different from the building of papers, and so tangible.  It is hard for me to start this type of work–the real kind, of dancing or cleaning or this, data entry.  The paper writing feels much more important, and more likely to fill my desires.  How ironic, and how lovely is it that yesterday when I dug in and started to type, it wasn’t long before I ran smack right back into Mr. Laban, only this time I didn’t feel so much like saying “will you go away already?  I’m tired of you!” as I have been.  Maybe I jump to conclusions, but I daresay I the work refreshed me.  At times like this I can’t help but think for a moment, “my life is perfect”.

There’s no way I would have written this blog post, or maybe even had this experience, if I hadn’t recently read “The Third Letter: To Discuss Learning” in Laura Riding’s Four Unposted Letters to Catharine.  Also, this post may not make sense if you too haven’t read that.  So here is an excerpt – please read!  If you want more, leave a comment. I will lend you my copy.

And if I hadn’t been in on a series of discussions with my seminar group and teachers Michael Mercil and Ann Hamilton, I wouldn’t have read that, so I want to throw a “thanks” out there to them, too.