When I go for my field visits in Rajasthan, magically I am able to wake up at 6 AM, have breakfast at 7:30 AM, lunch at 1 PM, dinner at 7 PM and sleep by 10:30 PM. Along with all this, I am also able to be productive and accomplish so much in one day. Every time I look at my watch, I acknowledge how slow time passes.
Somehow, this amazing routine gets messed up every time I come back to Delhi. I start feeling rushed again, screen times go high up, routine goes out of the window, and before I know it, I am back to having not so productive days.
When I gave it a deep thought some time back, I realized why it happens. Because I am more distracted in Delhi than I am in Rajasthan – courtesy of being spoilt for choice.
The struggle to be attentive
One of the most basic things I do during the field visits is to eat in the campus mess where I stay. The mess is in the kitchen and everyone has to leave whatever they are doing and go to the kitchen to eat during meal time. Often times, I used to leave my phone behind in my room when I went to the mess. It didn’t take long to eat, but I could really enjoy and relish the food with some conversation. I never ate with a screen in front of me during my field visits.
But somehow when I am working from home, I find myself eating while in a meeting with my video off, eating while watching a Youtube video, having a so called ‘working lunch’ etc. When I was working at a startup, I don’t even remember enjoying a single meal – I was constantly working. This tendency of eating while parallelly doing something else struck me every time I came back from my field visits.
Slowing down in the day
I kept reflecting on my routine in Delhi and decided that I will not be in front of a screen during meal time, unless there was some seriously urgent matter. For the next few weeks, I did not watch any videos, or play music, or work while I ate. I just focused on my food and really tasted what I ate.
Making this one simple shift ensured that I was not mindlessly eating, or over eating, or legit gulping without even tasting my food. Because I was focused on my food, I could make changes to what I ate and whether I was missing out on having a balanced meal.
As someone who cooks her breakfast and partial lunch, it increased my joy to be able to focus on the nourishing aspect of my food. Ditching the screen during meal time gave me a sense of power over my day that I had forgotten about.
But most importantly, it released me from the shackles of making my life all about work or screens, to really enjoying those regular, mundane, everyday aspects of my day that I was totally missing out on.
Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash
