Spring Cleaning

Sometimes spring cleaning starts at 6 pm on a Friday afternoon when you realize that you have met your monthly client-billable goal (I am a patent lawyer) and work will not have to spill into your weekend. Sometimes you feel so light after throwing away all the garbage that were covering the floor of your home office for the last two years, that you feel like writing a blog---the first one of this year.

 

For some reason, today I am in a nostalgic mood. The nostalgia triggered when I took a bite into the perfectly ripened loquats plucked from the neighborhood tree while walking the dog. This year’s spring has been delayed. I can tell because the loquats were ripened much earlier in Spring 2020 when we were first learning to work from home. Between me, my husband and our son, the poor dog used to have to walk miles during the day, because none of us is a smoker, but we needed the proverbial “smoking break” to de-stress, and dog walking was our excuse to get some fresh air in the middle of the day.

 

The transition to work from home was not easy for me. I was the type who would drive to work five days a week even when others were uncomfortable going to office with the COVID news spreading gradually in February-March 2020 time frame. My excuses were varied-- “I get to listen to my audiobooks if I drive to work,” “I need hard copies to effectively read a reference and the office printer is so much faster than my home printer!” “I can close the door of the office room and protect myself from the spread of virus,” “If it were that bad, then the Government would mandate office closure.” Well, eventually the Government did, and in a fit of panic, I carried a lot of work materials, mostly stacks of printed references for my various patent cases, to home, thinking I would not be able to print that many pages at home. They took up a good part of the floor in my home office. Luckily I was the first one to occupy the room set up as home office, so my husband reluctantly but graciously set up his home office in the guest room across the corridor. His “office” always looked cleaner than mine. He was already mostly paperless. But I guess I am different. It takes a pandemic to finally transform me into a true paperless person. Always loved the trees. Now I get to walk the walk.

 

Still, not adding new printed material is not the same as having the “courage” to decide to throw the existing printed materials away. My attitude was that if I had decided to print them at some point, they must have been important, and how can I throw away important stuff? What if I need them again in future? So let them sit on my floor. And sit they did for two years. Mostly untouched. Radiating the intangible perceived gravitas of “important enough not to throw away.”

 

It must be the perfection of the loquat that instantly took me back to the dog walk days of March 2020 and epiphany struck—now that we are required to go to office three or more days a week, am I going to carry all those materials back to office again to repopulate the shelves? The answer was clear as daylight. And by the end of the day I can again see the hardwood floor of my home office. Cleaner office. Lighter soul. And a blog after six months. Triple crown to start the weekend on the right note. What can be better!