Scattered

"I think," I said in what I hoped was a very measured tone, "that one of the hardest things about this job is how unpredictabe it is." My coworker agreed without skipping a beat. She had watched me return to the office twice in a row, only to be called right as I walked in, feet away from my desk, and asked to go out to another part of the hospital. In between the first and second, there'd been a third call, but that time I only made it to the stairwell. Which begs the question "Why were you even trying? Why not just stay put?"

The answer is that I was trying because you just never know. Often I'll wait after an encounter ends, hang around in a random hallway and see if I'll get another call. Sometimes I do, other times I don't. Sometimes I wait around for 20 minutes, afraid of looking lazy in comparison to all the busy nurses and techs and maintenance people walking past me. But I'm not lazing about - waiting is just part of my workflow. But you never know how long it's going to be. It's like waiting for the bus and not being sure what the traffic pattern is like at the moment. Or like checking facebook to see if you have any notifications. When, and where, and how intensely I have to work is not under my control. Period. One minute I might be making sure someone explains medication dosing so they can go home, the next moment I might be giving a worried mom an explanation for why her child is suddenly in the ICU. You just never know. And you might have 2 minutes between calls, or you might have 40.

And now I'm starting to wonder if training myself to jump to it when there's a call is bleeding over into the rest of my life. First I realized that it's impossible to do any task that requires lengthy concentration during my breaks at work. I would go in thinking "I'm going to work on building this presentation today!" and leave berating myself for having done exactly nothing. But the reality is that for a creative task like that, you - or at least, I - need time to muster the concentration and mental resources it requires. I can't just dive in for 5 minutes, or 10, and be productive. So I moved to tasks that I don't have to really settle into to get going: looking up places to get good used tires for my car, reading facebook articles I'd saved for later, that kind of thing.

But now I'm also noticing that it's become harder for me to sit down and concentrate. In my free time I've become liable to rushing around, distracted, cleaning things here and there, thinking of things I should be doing, trying to make lists and only half succeeding, thinking of things I could be doing... it's been increasingly difficult to settle down. What a curious thing, no? I'm not sure how much of this I can really blame on the job. For one thing, I'm sure other people feel like this. Moms, and people who keep very busy. And I'm sure lots of different things can make someone more scatterbrained than usual. But me, I really enjoy concentrating, and am craving centeredness. I'm thinking I need to start some practices that will help me concentrate, settle in to  something, and do it well.