Windows To The World

A view from my office into the back courtyard of the Headquarters Library.

Like many people in my business, I've had my share of doing the musical chair scene, cycling myself through whatever creative studios, agencies, and publishing houses allowed me, while I gouged out my career like some giant, lumbering glacier that carved its way through the mountains until it reached its final resting place and disolved into the sea.

Along the way, my office accommodations have run the gamut: from working on a slab of thick glass I straddled between two filing cabinets to make a desk out of while freelancing in my spare bedroom-turned studio; to having my head poke up out of a cubicle amid a vast sea of other cubicles for a major corporation's in-house creative department; to working on a state-of-the-art networked computer system in a private office on the 44th floor of a skyscraper in New York CIty's Rockefeller Center.

Some of my more memorable workplace windows included views directly down into the heart of Times Square; a view into Central Park through a sliver of light between two condominium towers; even a most impressive, expansive, view of the Empire State Building and lower Manhattan from a high rise in midtown. And for offices that didn't have the greatest of views, I was only steps away from such memorable places as Thanksgiving Square in downtown Dallas, New York City's Union Square, Singapore's Chinatown, or Bangkok, Thailand's bustling Plonchit Road and associated side streets---all choked with both street food vendors and vehicle exhaust fumes. Ahhh, those were the days.

Nowadays, my office at the Headquarters Library for the Alachua County Library District looks out through six floor-to-ceiling colonial style windows into the back courtyard of the library. It is a peaceful, quiet, and calming view of flowering bushes, short palms, and creek-side trees with Spanish moss hanging from their branches. I fully open the blinds in my office to let the light flow in, and---because they face north---I can get good, ambient light and avoid the sweltering and harsh, direct light that the southern facing sides of the building get. My office view is the kind one would want to see from their sun room (or as they call their screened-in back porches down here, their "Florida Room"). And since I literally have no view from my own personal residence, my office windows do a lot of making up for that deficiency.

I occasionally wonder which of the many windows were the best I ever had. It's a tough call. But I'd have to say that on views alone, I'd take a serene view of nature like this one any day over the bustling, noisy streets of the big city. This way, I can literally say that I made it over to the other side where the grass is greener.

That being said, however, sometimes I just wished my windows could open.