Tuesday mornings always find me feeling a bit behind the eight ball as far as work is concerned. It’s a problem of my own making: I attend a yoga class that starts at eight in the morning. What with socializing with classmates after the session is over, getting my mail at the post office, and constantly running into friends and acquaintances, I often don’t manage to get down to work until 10 in the morning. This means if I’m going to bill eight hours I’ve got to work until 6 p.m. straight without taking a lunch. Ouch!

Those darned acquaintances. You don’t realize it when you live in a city, but small-town living is all about running into folks wherever you go. This can be a drain on productivity, though certainly a pleasant one. One of those omnipresent Internet lists titled “You Know You’re From Vermont If” includes the following item:

It takes you three hours to go to the store for one item even when you’re in a rush because you have to stop and talk to everyone in town.

This is true.

But I manage to give my yoga practice such little time in my life as it is, that I just can’t give up Tuesday mornings. Even if I find myself starting a bit late, I generally have a better frame of mind to attack my daily tasks.

I started to practice yoga a little over 10 years ago, and at different times in my life I have managed to dedicate quite a few hours to it. From my first class, I have been fascinated by the effect the practice has on my mind. In a word (or four), it shuts it up. My own mind’s tendency is to be overly rational. That I gravitated toward a job in computer modeling is primary evidence of this. I’ve observed that a hyper-rational mind often comes with a certain degree of detachment from the world, and an unhealthy dose of egotism as well.

Through the practice of yoga, I’ve started to learn that when you manage to stop this constant blather from the mind, a pure layer of perception can start to come into your life. It is from this pure perception, unmodified by thought, that one starts to acutely feel the effects of one’s actions.

In my experience, such pure perception makes a yoga practitioner feel the effects of violence more acutely. I have heard several people discuss the fact that they feel vulnerable after finishing a yoga class. This is because they have been robbed of the shield that is their constantly moving mind. Without this shield, a practitioner can see every homeless person, smell every car fume, or feel the rage of each angry driver for what those things are.

People who start to perceive the effects of violence within their lives will usually try to eliminate it, generally starting with their own behavior. This is probably the most basic tenet of yoga ethics, ahimsa or non-violence.

This brings me back to my work. It is all fine and good to try to understand the consequences of various actions as they apply to complex systems. But to make this analysis matter, a set of ethical precepts must apply so that each consequence has meaning. And these ethical principles can become crystal clear when you manage to make your mind quiet down for a while.

That’s the way that I see it, anyway.

The office-mates.

My two office-mates are a bunch of sad sacks today. These guys look like the Larsen cartoon about a boneless chicken farm in which the chickens lie around like big blobs. They are suffering from the fairly intense heat and the fact that I have no car to drive them to Blueberry Lake.

Still, they are a good kind of colleague to have. They don’t let me go a day without taking a walk. They never object to the music that I play. True, they do bark during conference calls occasionally, and I wish I could do something about their breath. But they are close to perfect work-mates.

Okay, now I’ve really got to get down to work.

Tuesday, 23 Jul 2002

WARREN, Vt.