What, me mindful?

Yesterday afternoon I knocked off work and drove out to where the UU Sangha meets, the one that I attend when I can.  It was a nice day so I thought, "I'll take the scenic route."  Five minutes into the drive I realized I was taking the ugly route, by force of habit.  Shortly after that I realized I had left the remains of my lunch on my desk instead of packing it up.  Gosh, Hosea, that probably won't be so appetizing by tomorrow morning.  So I drove back to the office, picked up my lunch, and left again -- this time taking the scenic route!

Then as I drove along I found my mind fully absorbed in some kind of story or fantasy, ... something far more interesting than the drive.  This continued fully halfway there, and then something else caught my attention for just an instant ... and I could no longer remember what I had been thinking about.  So not only was I not being present to the drive, I wasn't even present to my own escapist fantasy.

I've been like this lately.  I also haven't been posting.  I wonder if there is a correlation, or if it's just a coincidence that my mind is so scattered at the same time that I'm showing no regular consistency with this blog?  ("Correlation" is probably better than "causation" here ... I have no idea which way a causal linkage would go.)  What else could be related?

One thought that comes to mind is my sloth-fest last weekend.  But it's a little hard for me to think that that's everything.  If it were, ... well, what about last week?  I've been like this for a while.
 
A more intriguing (but possibly false) correlation is that my schedule at work hasn't been very meeting-heavy lately.  So my deadlines have all been self-imposed.  This could have lead to a lot of posting if I just decided to blow off work completely.  But in fact I've been struggling to figure out a new way to calculate ... well, never mind, you wouldn't be interested in the details.  Suffice it to say that one of our administrative systems has been held together all this time with duct tape and chewing gum, and I finally decided to try to overhaul it.  And found out I can't.  So I've been hacking away at trying to cook up a second-best solution.  On the one hand it has been kind of pleasant to have a project that I can dive into and ignore the rest of the world.  I've spent several lunchtimes (when I might otherwise have written something) just continuing to work unabated.  On the other hand from time to time I have all at once gotten so bored of it that I launch out into Internet-land, looking up some old movie or odd phrase in Wikipedia and then losing the next hour in random clicking.  So it hasn't been solid work, but my breaks from work have been unfocussed and undirected.  Unproductive.  It does kinda look like there could be a connection.

Of course there's no magic bullet to fixing it.  Just get up and start in again.  Maybe this will help.