A few years ago, we sold our house and moved into a new one that we had built. The old house happened to be the one in which I had grown up. The process of disconnecting from that house got me back in touch with a lot of tasks that had become muscle memory. For example, mowing the lawn.
I had mowed that lawn roughly every week since middle school. By the time I was mowing it for what I realized was the last time, I could have done so blindfolded. I knew where every obstacle was and knew every contour in the ground. I had long since stopped paying attention to the task. There were many other things that I realized had become the same for me.
I am having a similar set of realizations as I wind down my time at my current workplace, in preparation to move to Spatial Networks. I have discovered old code sitting in archives that should never have been saved for more than a few weeks. I have found notebooks from meetings over decade ago that have stayed on a shelf for far too long. The drive to the base in Dahlgren has become muscle memory, as has the tempo of pay and associated automatic payments.
All of these are details to which I now need to pay attention has I upend my entrenched work life. Both this situation and sale of our old house a few years ago have gotten me wondering about how much detail I may have missed as many things settled into autopilot. The clarity and renewed engagement resulting from these changes has been incredibly refreshing in ways that I did not anticipate.
I expect new challenges in my next role and I am looking forward to them. The situation I am leaving has been a great one and I expect the role into which I am stepping to also be great. I had not expected the process of changing in advance of actually beginning my new role to be so clarifying.
Now to work on building the habits to keep what I have recaptured.
