暖冬cool夏
這裏一年四季溫暖如春，沒有酷暑沒有嚴寒......
今夜下了冰雹，足足有十分鍾，冰雹猛烈地抽打著客廳通往後院的玻璃門。等雨聲變小，我打開後院，一下子驚呆了。一層厚厚白白的像雪一樣覆蓋著靠牆的那一片褐土，門口的石階上也是厚厚一層。我俯下身用手抓起一把，再攤開來在掌心，一粒粒半透明的雪子像晶瑩的小珍珠，滑膩冰涼。
後來知道這並不是冰雹，是由雷雨帶來的雪(thundersnow)。想起上周末還是80多度的熱浪天，一轉眼，天公變臉了，下起了罕見的"雷雪"。於我，這是第一次見，故此起個好聽的名字--"珍珠雪"，並存照於此，以紀念我和它的初相識。
When the last dish was set on the table for dinner around 6:30pm, the rain started to gather its strength amid roaring thunders and lightning. He got up to close the living room window, but no sooner, dull but loud drum-like sounds were heard whipping against the glass door. “It must be hailing.” I thought to myself without stopping the meal. The whipping sounds continued for another 10 minutes.
By the time we finished dinner, the wild hailing sounds retreated. As I opened the backyard door, the sight struck me in awe. The ground that was left in bare earth is now covered in white, as if it just snowed an inch. Without stepping out, I scooped up a handful of hails from the concrete doorstep, not knowing that these white pea-sized crystallic balls are actually called “thundersnow”, a very rare weather phenomenon in Southern CA. As I clumsily fumbled with the cell phone in one hand to catch the nightly scene, the chill of the freezing thundersnow in another penetrated the palm. For once, I had to drop them before scooping them back for a picture.
Later this afternoon, an email from our boss informed us that beginning next Monday (2/21/2022) we will resume the December’s work schedule, i.e. we have to show up two days weekly in office. I actually like this hybrid office-home work shift as far as I could stay immune to the virus. But the fact that I did not take the booster is like a cloud hanging over my head. My decision of not taking the third shot was out of the suspicion that the vaccine from two jabs has actually triggered a certain old immune system problems. Though they were gone by now, another shot may reactivate them.
下星期開始又要一星期回公司上班兩天了。最近讀到The Atlantic裏的一篇文章，覺得挺有意思，特抄此。人的生活作息、對通勤的心理在疫情後微妙地變化著。曾經一度被人們厭惡、痛恨的通勤似乎又有了被人懷念的一麵。想起女兒曾經說過，每天下班坐公共汽車回家是她一天中最放鬆、最享受的時光。
且聽聽專業人士的看法和研究的結果。
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The Psychological Benefits of Commuting to Work
Many people who have been working from home are experiencing a void they can’t quite name.
By Jerry Useem
This article was published online on June 9, 2021 and updated at 3:09 p.m. ET on July 29, 2021. (The Atlantic)
Back when commuting was a requirement for going to work, I once passed through a subway tunnel so filthy and crowded that the poem inscribed on its ceiling seemed like a cruel joke. “overslept, / so tired. / if late, / get fired. / why bother? / why the pain? / just go home / do it again.” “The Commuter’s Lament,” which adorns a subterranean passage in New York City’s 42nd Street station, made the already grim ritual of getting to and from work positively Dante-esque. But no one questioned the gist of it. The commute, according to the Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman’s research, ranked as the single most miserable part of our day. A Swiss study held long commutes responsible for “systematically lower subjective well-being.”
And then, during the coronavirus pandemic, something bizarre happened. For many of us, the scourge we’d spent a lifetime bad-mouthing as a tedious time-waster went away. While essential workers have continued to brave the roads and rails—sometimes suffering truly punishing commute times—many others have lived for more than a year in a commute-less world. Some think they’re never going back to the office, while others are receiving “return to work” notices from their employers explaining that, come September, butts will once again need to be in cubicle chairs.
But here’s the strange part. Many people liberated from the commute have experienced a void they can’t quite name. In it, all theaters of life collapse into one. There are no beginnings or endings. The hero’s journey never happens. The threshold goes uncrossed. The sack of Troy blurs with Telemachus’s math homework. And employers—even the ones that have provided the tools for remote work—see cause for alarm. “No commute may be hurting, not helping, remote worker productivity,” a Microsoft report warned last fall. After-hours chats were up 69 percent among users of the company’s messaging platform, and workers were less engaged and more exhausted.
In its pre-pandemic heyday, we very narrowly thought of the commute as doing one job: getting us to and from our place of work. But clearly, the commute was doing something more, something that we failed to appreciate. What was it?
In 1994, an Italian physicist named Cesare Marchetti noted that throughout history, humans have shown a willingness to spend roughly 60 minutes a day in transit. This explains why ancient cities such as Rome never exceeded about three miles in diameter. The steam train, streetcar, subway, and automobile expanded that distance. But transit times stayed the same. The one-way average for an American commute stands at about 27 minutes.
Marchetti’s Constant, as those 60 minutes are known, is usually understood to describe what people will endure, not what they might actually desire. But if you take the richest people of any era—who can afford to design their lives however they like—and calculate the transit time between their home and workplace, what do you find? J. P. Morgan: a roughly 25-minute ride by horse-drawn cab. John D. Rockefeller: an elevated-rail ride of about 30 minutes.
In a 2001 paper, two researchers at UC Davis attempted to divine the ideal commute time. They settled on 16 minutes. To be sure, this was a substantial shortening of the study participants’ actual commutes (which were half an hour, on average). But it was not zero. In fact, a few wished for a longer commute. Asked why, they ticked off their reasons—the feeling of control in one’s own car; the time to plan, to decompress, to make calls, to listen to audiobooks. Clearly, the researchers wrote, the commute had some “positive utility.”
Before the pandemic, researchers had begun to unpack what that utility was. I reached one of them, Jon Jachimowicz of Harvard Business School, who contrasted WeWork and its ill-fated spin-off, WeLive. Pitched in the company’s doomed IPO prospectus, WeLive claimed to offer “everything you need to live, work and play in a single location.” But it never expanded beyond two locations. This could have something to do with the limits of grown-up demand for dorm life. But, Jachimowicz told me, “if everyone hated commuting as much as they say they do, we’d see these WeLive spaces everywhere.”
Gail sheehy wrote about “the commuter’s double life” for New York magazine in 1968, profiling the specific personalities aboard the 5:25, 6:02, and 9:57 out of Grand Central Station. As Sheehy wrote: “You get a very strong feeling of two lives with the train a bridge.” The distance between those two lives is explored in a body of research loosely known as “boundary theory,” and this, perhaps, is where we see the commute’s more important job.
Broadly, boundary theory holds that however much Facebook encourages employees to bring their “authentic selves” to work, we have multiple selves, all of them authentic. Crossing between one role and another isn’t easy; it’s called boundary work. And the commute, as Arizona State University’s Blake Ashforth and two collaborators wrote in a seminal paper on the topic, “is actually a relatively efficient way of simultaneously facilitating a physical and psychological shift between roles.”
Consider the morning drive in. While superficially a matter of on- and off-ramps, it also initiates a sequence in which the feelings and attitudes of home life are deactivated, replaced by thoughts of work. This takes time, and if it doesn’t happen, one role can contaminate the other—what researchers call “role spillover.” “If you respond like a manager at home, you might be sleeping on the couch that night,” Jachimowicz explained. “And if you respond like a parent at work,” it’s weird.
He and his colleagues found that workers who engaged in “role-clarifying prospection” during their morning commute—deliberately thinking about plans for the workday—reported higher levels of satisfaction with both their work and home lives than those who either zoned out or ruminated on personal problems. Skipping this cognitively difficult task left them in limbo, making each place more stressful.
Technology can help. In a 2017 experiment, a team at Microsoft installed a program called SwitchBot on commuters’ phones. Before the start and end of each workday, the bot would pose simple questions. A morning session helped the participants transition into productive work mode, while prompts to detach at day’s end—“How did you feel about work today? Is there anything else you would like to share?”—brought forth something unexpected. “People apparently would just spill out their day,” Shamsi Iqbal, a researcher who helped design the study, told me. In reliving their day, they “relieved themselves” of it (and sent fewer after-hours emails as a result).
Why was this a good thing? Because the ability to detach from a job, Iqbal explained, is part of what makes a good worker. New research shows that it’s crucial to facilitating mental rejuvenation. Without it, burnout rises, effort increases, and productivity ultimately drops.
But all of this research was done before the pandemic, and it was aimed at helping commuters commute better. Now we have to ask: What if the commute never comes back—or at least not every weekday? Can we replace it?
When I gave up my own commute some years ago, I came to a realization. The smell of the café car, the gathering of the shoulder bag, the clack of shoes on the lobby floor—all the sensory cues saying You’re a professional journalist arriving in Manhattan for work would be gone. After a brief period of jubilation, I began to wonder if getting to work was the same as getting to work. A spacecraft approaching a planet too fast can bounce off the atmosphere right back into space, and you can rearrange a lot of desk items and check a lot of sports scores before realizing you’ve spaced out, too.
If I was going to replace my commute, I’d have to get strategic.
I developed a set of tricks. Matching my surroundings with the task at hand seemed important. Deep research was best done in the stacks of a nearby library; writing, in coffee shops. Commuting directly from the desk to the dinner table was a bad idea. A run or stroll outside first. But no strolling in the a.m. Mornings, you walk like you’re late for something. Above all: An underdressed day is an unproductive day. So if a deadline looms, out comes the writing blazer. In office attire, you can’t take out the trash or water the lawn without a strong feeling that you ought to be doing something else. Like your job.
I was pleased to find an entire academic paper called “Enclothed Cognition” that backed me up on this. When people are asked to do a difficult task involving visual concentration, they make about half as many errors if they first put on a white lab coat. (If they’re told it’s a painter’s coat, it helps, but only marginally.) The coat has a symbolic power, the paper says, which “is not realized until one physically wears and thus embodies the clothes.”
How did the rest of my routine hold up? I sought the advice of Ezra Bookman, a corporate-ritual designer (yes, this is a real job) based in Brooklyn. His work includes coming up with work ideas like “funerals” for failed projects. “Every single conversation I have with corporate clients is the same, “6he told me: “Employees are burnt out and have no separation between home and life.”
Naturally, he has come up with some rituals to replace the commute and mark the beginning and end of each day. The ideas he’s proposed to clients include lighting variations, warm-up stretches, cellphone-free walks, and, as he demonstrated to me over Zoom, shrouding your computer in a fine blue cloth when you log off, as if it, too, needs a good night’s sleep.
“Rituals are friction,” he told me. Like the commute, “they slow us down. They’re so antithetical to most of our life, which is all about efficiency and speed.” One ritual that worked for Bookman was changing his laptop password to “Deep Breath”: “It helps me to locate myself in time and say, ‘Okay, what am I here to do?’”
Iqbal, the Microsoft researcher, said that this was the same idea behind a “virtual commute” that her company has just released. An onscreen tap on the shoulder—“Ready to leave for the day?”—signals that it’s time to knock off. The shutdown sequence has you bookmark what you were working on. It invites you to “take a minute to breathe and reset,” in sync, if you like, with a calming mediation video. Because work is done.
All of which is to say: With mediation exercises, costume changes, and chatbots, you too can replicate what the commute did for you. In the meantime, let’s finally spare a kind word for something we’ve spent our lives abusing—for the highways and the subways, for the bagelwich and the jostled coffee, for the traffic tie-up and the terrible screech in the tunnel. Two optimistic subway vandals did it 10 years ago. Tired of that underground poem’s eternal griping, they briefly replaced WHY THE PAIN? With MUCH TO GAIN.
小小平時活動多，其實對身體/眼睛都好的，堅持，活動吧，精神上體質都得到提升。再次感謝小小的周到，晚安!
我曾做過一個伽菲珈而的歌曲專輯，那天回複暖冬留言時，一時憑記憶瞎寫，想著趕快告訴暖冬一聲。
暖冬，新周愉快！：））
是的，又要回去上班了，人已經有點習慣了這種懶散，白天晚上工作個人時間模糊的這樣一種生活，看看吧，回去上班會是這樣的感受。是的，日子好快，轉眼又是一個星期，一個月了。謝謝秋水臨帖，周末快樂!
暖冬又要回公司上班了，一周隻去兩天，最好了：）問候親愛的暖冬，咋這麽快又要周末了。預祝周末愉快！：）
昨天，我們這邊許多朋友家附近都下了小冰雹，可我家距一個朋友隻2分鍾路程，就沒有看到下小冰雹，下的是毛毛雨：））不論如何，加州太缺水了，喜見珍珠雪、小冰雹、毛毛雨：））
問好暖冬，周中快樂！：））
你那邊還真的降了一定的雨，好事情呀。我昨天去公司上班，來回都遇上陣雨，但雨勢不大。我家這邊，一滴雨都沒有下。這個冬季的降雨量還是太少，加州的旱情恐怕是不會緩解了。
人就是這樣的，失去的就是好的。
哈哈哈，很同意，名字很美，打在頭上很痛！我們的車有次都被弄出了小“窟窿”——印子。：）
哇，加州都80度了呀。
圓眼看珍珠雪，越看越像冰湯圓，珠圓玉潤的節奏。艾瑪，吃貨又圓形畢露了！
謝謝暖冬存照留念，分享在此。英文文章收藏了，有空細讀。