eLearnesque: #walktowork

Over the last year after changing my job I have had the pleasure of walking to work instead of an hour and 30 mins commute both ways by car. It seems like I am not the only the one and over the last few weeks I have found a small crowd of walktowork hastaggers tweeting pictures of their daily stroll. I still enjoy walking to work but it is mostly the same route so I thought a way to liven this up was to take a picture with my ipad and tweet this along with the track I was listening to when entered the door to work. The challenge I gave myself was to take a picture of the first thing that I thought was worth capturing, to not change my mind and to take an old fashioned approach by only taking the one picture and not to look at it until I got to work, thus not getting myself into the perfectionist digital spiral we all seem to get ourselves into. To be honest not looking at the picture was a greater challenge then I expected, initially it was a digital itch almost an automatic reaction to look and ponder whether I could have taken a better picture. The other antagonism was seeing something else as I walked to work that I thought would have made a better picture and to resist the temptation of taking picture of that.

It's interesting in days of yore before the digital camera explosion, the opportunities for perfectionism were particularly limited unless you had a really expensive polaroid instant. In fact taking a picture was almost a luxury, could I afford black and white or colour; should I buy a 400 or 100 film because I was not sure if I was going to be mainly inside or out, in shade or sun and finally shall I get a 24 or 36, as I was unsure the amount of poorly exposed pictures I would take and how many copies I would want. In fact I do not think I would have taken any pictures of my sojourn to work as I would have accepted the repetitive scene as an acceptable background to my walkman soundtrack.

Increasingly individuals are turning to mindfulness living in the present as a means of dealing with this fast paced world that we live in and often there are recommendations that we drop our digital baggage to enable this. However, listening to my music and taking my pictures has helped me to focus on the fascinating elements of my walk to work thus eradicating some of my relaxed mundanity. It is also fascinating to see that other fellow walking commuters are doing the same all over the world. I am really enjoying starting my day with posting my picture together with my soundtrack and my seeing what other passing scenes are being captured by the people in my #walktowork gang - so keep taking the pictures, I will.

Here is my current collection together with the tune I was listening to when I stepped into work