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The move from The City to Stillwater, Oklahoma, has not changed everything for me.  I still get up between five and five-thirty (and the first time each morning is at five to five-thirty Eastern Time...which is an hour ahead of my current Central).  I still arrive at work between seven and seven-thirty.  I still have a fair bit of walking to do to get to where I need to go.  And I am still at the office longer than I really ought to be or need to be (although I really ought to get more done in my days...).

One thing that has very much changed, though, is the way I get to work.  Instead of walking to a subway from which I walk to my office, I simply walk the mile or so from my front door to the desk where I sit as I type out this blog post.  This means that I get a bit of exercise each day (two miles walking, plus a little more during the day, in addition to aikido or any other fitness activities I might take up, time permitting).  It also means that I am out in the weather and in the world, and that has proven good for me.

This morning, for instance, I walked to work as the sun rose over the university campus, chasing away cloud cover with cool and damp wind.  The heavens above the red brick buildings were painted pink and purple, yellow and orange, gilded by the bright flaming ball of the day-lamp.  While I have waxed poetic about my earlier commute, that to which I am moved by my morning and evening walks to and from work is a far different feeling from that which being carried along dank, hot tunnels in rattling coffins of glass, metal, and the stink of too many people in too small a place evokes.

The adjustment to life here has not been as easy as I could have hoped.  I had adapted fairly decently to The City, mostly by becoming able to ignore it more or less consistently, looking at it only so long as to evaluate what seemed to be a potential threat or a potential benefit and allowing the rest to fade into the pervasive concrete gray and the preferred sartorial black.  That particular skill, if it can be called a skill, does not serve me particularly well here, but it has become a habit.  I am very much a creature of habit, finding it harder to adjust to new things than I perhaps ought.  But if more things could be like this morning for me, I think I would have an easier time doing so.