And then, having the ultimate perfect weather day today also helped.<\/p>\n
But perhaps most helpful of all was walking out onto the back deck and seeing this:<\/p>\n
I planted that tree myself a number of years ago, and it barely blossomed the first couple of years. Before I headed out on my vacation it was not yet interesting in any way. Seeing it like that was a very pleasant shock, and might possibly have put me into a satori moment.<\/p>\n And, you know, the fact that my next vacation starts in four days is also helping. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Of course I have a schedule tomorrow that runs from 8:30AM until 11PM, so we’ll see how long my vacation inspired Zen calm lasts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Instead of focusing on the imminent end of my vacation, I chose–very explicitly–to enjoy the day as completely as possible. This was made somewhat easy by the fact that this morning I was able to sleep in until I awoke naturallyI can count the number of times this has happened since I became a parent on the fingers of one… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[260,255,159],"class_list":["post-2582","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storytime","tag-beautiful-things","tag-like-a-damn-diary","tag-thinking","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-FE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2582"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2582\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2584,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2582\/revisions\/2584"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Apple](\"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-content\/images\/2009\/05\/apple.jpg\" "\\"Apple")
<\/a><\/p>\n