The Standing Desk [reborn]
When we traded from one side of the Atlantic to the other, not everything could come along. One of the items whose value was less than the effort of shipping was the home-made standing desk I had built on the cheap from a reused children’s desk and a few two-by-fours. In two years of use, that desk revolutionized my workday, magically removing (the causes of) neck and muscle strain that had plagued my seated self, making the flow between work and quick exercises “sprints” natural and easy, straightening that slump in my desk-riding posture and, according to the Aussies, had increased the quality and length of my life by a number of years.
We also didn’t know what our Spanish housing would look like, and were fairly sure the space available would be on more human, European standards, so I decided to make do for a while once we landed. Surely a couple of months sitting at the kitchen table wouldn’t kill me!
Well… not dead but aching. Once the body breathes an expansive sigh of relief, packing it back into a contorted position is as much a psychological struggle as it is a physical one. I quickly relocated from kitchen table to the top of my bedroom armoire, with a waist-height bookshelf dragged over to be my keyboard table. Whew! Now that felt much better!
Until, lifting my eyes from the dazzling, blinding Screen, I surveyed the wreckage of my bedroom. Not only was it difficult to open the left door of my armoire – that’s the underwear and socks side of things – but the bookshelf crowded the walkway to our lovely terrace, and our coziest inner sanctum had been stained with this digital junk. Yuck. As I have said before and maintain now, the Internet drills a hole in your house through which mostly unpleasant things leak; if a necessary evil, at least choose a good placement for that hole. The bedroom is not it.
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Since I work from home and the evil is necessary, it can be minimized, and a second guest bedroom, sparsely used, is it, so I began planning my migration. Space is at a premium. Space should always be at a premium: and if every corner of my home is not precious, might I’ve got too much home? At any rate, I didn’t want to create a Work Monstrosity that made that room a dead zone. We’d certainly have more temporary house guests, and in January will have a permanent house mate joining us. I thought a bit about what I wanted, something that:
- Would be trim against the wall, or could be mounted on it
- Could easily be moved out of the way when occasional guests arrived
- Would be inexpensive and transportable to a future home
I didn’t have to search long. The local hardware store had just the thing: collapsible wall brackets. Not too bad, about 60€ for four of them (two for the monitor shelf, two for the keyboard shelf). A couple of euros extra for wall screws and settings, oh and I left my 120V drill in the States, so some diminishing percentage of a 50€ investment in tools (prorated against past and future projects). Basic cost was not too bad, though I would have to find a lumber store to track down shelves – and wood is expensive here.
Creativity is cheap, though. All creativity wants is a little time…
The trigger-purchase consumer society around us is the enemy of Creativity, and the enemy of creativity is the enemy of the people. Thich Nhat Hanh offered a beautiful antidote to trigger consumption, and I use it as often as I remember it. (Each time I remember it, it becomes easier to use it.) He says: any time you are going to make a purchase – any purchase – first take a breath; if you need that item as much as you need breath, then buy it. If you don’t need it that much, you might want to take another breath before you let someone take your hard-won earnings.
I was there with the cash in my hand, and I took a breath. So many people here find creative ways to get things done, often in community. At the urban garden, folks bring in dry bamboo they collected along the river walk for staking beans, and discarded 200-liter oil and olive drums to use as water catchment. They also reuse wooden pallets left out for recycling to contain their raised garden beds… no cost. You could find those pallets the first Monday of every month, when construction materials are rounded up by the city.
-- Hm! I thought, while walking from the garden toward home. Often, home renovators stack things along the streets that day as well. If I were a good hortelan Urban Gardener I might take a look and see what might be discarded and waiting for a new home… It’s even Monday… Wonder if…
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Leaning against an apartment building on the side of the pedestrian road was a stack of wood: a 1 foot by 6 foot panel (perfect width, extra trimmable length), and a dismantled computer desk, one piece of which was a made-to-order keyboard tray. I dusted off the first, with a few small holes where screws had been, particle board that wanted a little taping on the sides to keep its edges intact; the second came with a couple of brackets that would be easily removable. All I did was allow the possibility of a creative solution, and the solution manifests itself.
I could have taken extra wood and create semi-permanent brackets as well. This would have required the cost of four hinges and screws, and some extra time – so with my bedroom complaining and working self desiring a stable space sooner than later, I decided to go with the pre-fab metal, buying the installing the brackets in a couple of hours.
And this is where I write, now: standing on the wool meditation rug I bought from the Tibetan meditation master in Cambridge, light and sea breeze filtering in the window to my right, free weights at my feet for quite reflex breaks, music streaming in from some more elevated corner of the Internet, the rest of my home behind me in the tidy disarray of local lives.
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