Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Blurred lines

I signed up for Twitter this week, adding yet another social-media outlet to my stable. I realized that the line between my personal social media avatar and my professional persona is becoming increasingly blurred. Experts remind me that I must mindfully consider what information I share on which site; how personal disclosure may affect my professional life and vice versa.

But the cyber realm is not the only place where delineation is not apparent, and I’m not so sure it’s bad thing. As I juggle my roles as an office worker (in my own home) and Minister of Household Affairs (a euphemistic title shamelessly cribbed from a colleague), I often find myself moving from desk to kitchen and back. Today for example, my computer was clamoring for me to update something and reboot, so I decided to take an early lunch break while it went through its gyrations. As I passed the kitchen window with its view of sun and buds and flowers, I couldn’t help noticing what a lovely spring day was beckoning. Opening the larder for an onion, I was greeted by potatoes and garlic sprouted past edibility. So after my tasty lunch, I gathered up the sprouted wonders and headed downstairs again, only glancing at my computer screen long enough to determine that no clients had any fires to put out. Leaving the door open a crack for fresh air (and so the cat could join me), I spent a delicious hour getting my nails dirty, tucking the potatoes and garlic into the earth. Like the bulbs I plant in the fall, I know I shall be seeing them in the kitchen again at the end of the growing season.

And I realized that just as the line between my professional and personal lives is at times ill-defined, the delineation between growing and preparing food and eating and health are indeed blurry lines, if there are lines at all. The food from my garden came into the kitchen to nourish us; and that which we do not use in a timely fashion ends up back in the garden, either as the seed or the soil.

How wrong we are to think we have come so far, with our industrially-prepared meals and compartimentalized lives, where work is separate from “life,” and where the process of bringing living food to what goes onto our tables and into our bodies is obfuscated. How appalling that we not not seem to realize that we wound ourselves with our unthinking acceptance of being stuffed into neatly-defined cubicles? How artificial it all seems, and how utterly foolish of us to not reclaim and embrace the ambuguity of that whole messy thing called life.