Moving offices -- a parallel to life

It was recently announced that in a giant corporate game of musical chairs, almost all of us will be shifting from one office to another.  And with that statement, most of us will be leaving behind the offices we've come to know as home for 9 or so hours a day...longer than we spend at home and awake on a typical weekday.

For some of us, that rearrangement also means leaving behind the comfort of a big office with a closed door and moving into a cubicle...that most wretched of corporate creations, clearly modeled after someone's long-ago rat maze experiment in a dark, damp college psych department basement. I would bet they got an "F" on it, by the way. Cubicles are their revenge.

Back to the move... as I inwardly (okay, a little outwardly, too) complained about the move, I realized that this kind of shuffling is a lot like life.

We get comfortable somewhere.  We go through our days, adding our own personal touches to our lives, in the belief that we are the master's of our destiny...or at least our daily life. ..

...and then WHAM, something completely out of our control sends us completely out of our comfort zone.  And in a flash, everything we expected to do each day is shifted...or gone.  And odds are we complain, and gripe as we pack up our old life and move somewhere else, whether it's a new location, a new relationship status or a new set of daily focuses.

But here's the kicker.  We complain and resist that change, EVEN IF IT'S SOMETHING GOOD!  Something better than we had before.  Now we're not talking somewhere down the road good, I mean even if it is "Slap you in the face and no mistake about it good."  We're still hanging on by our proverbial fingernails to what "used to be."

I want to try to break that pattern with this move to a new office.  So here are the pluses....

1) I will have a window -- a big window -- for the first time with this company.
2) The move will force me to look at what I need in my office, versus what ended up there, and that will clear the energy by clearing the clutter.
3) If I can create the right attitude, I will be one step closer to non-attachment to unimportant things.

Not there yet...I am still mourning for the office-with-a-door that I'm leaving, and I still think it's a mistake to uproot people like this.  But I have a glimmer of hope that come Wednesday morning, when I sit down and look out the window at the beautiful Florida sky, watch an airplane fly overhead, or maybe spot the family of raccoons I've been told play there, I will be on my way.

Decorating my space

I am a very visual person -- tell me a story, and I will see it in my head. Sometimes a good thing, sometimes really, really not!

But being visual, it's no wonder that one of my first thoughts on this job was "How can I decorate my office?"

It's plain. Boring. I posted a few photos and a congrats poem the first day. Hung my Rumi calendar. And that was it.

This company is big on encouraging people to decorate their personal space. They even sell lithographs to other people in other companies to decorate THEIR space. But I can figure out what I want to do here.

Warm and cozy? Exotic and mysterious? Peaceful and soothing? Modern and sleek? I did some searching on office decorating online -- sadly, most of the posts said "don't" Not an option. I was hoping for inspiration, not prohibitions!

What does your office look like? Are you allowed to decorate? Or indeed even encouraged to do so? I would love to hear about your office decorations or cubicle decorations. Pictures would be great, too!

Looking for inspiration...can you help?