Replace your code switch with a dimmer.

Lights on.

It starts as soon as the door to the office opens.

The idea of a professional.

Obligatory greetings, and half-assed attempts at being productive, while society collapses around you.

It doesn’t matter what’s going on in that little world of yours, because here?

You’re just an email address.

At best, you’re a means to an end.

A few extra brain cells to make sure the operation keeps going.

Regardless of if you do.

Perhaps during lunch you can find a place to escape.

Lights off.

Gradually, you remember that you are still human. Your lungs had your back even when you weren’t paying attention to them.

You actually were pretty hungry.

It actually is a nice day out.

Until you have to get back to work.

Lights on,

Actually, bathroom break.

Lights off.

Exhale.

Lights on.

Mama old you to stop playing with them lights, and you don’t even really look at your electricity bill anymore. It’s on autopay.

So you try turning off the lights, but the office doesn’t have a window.

Your natural light can’t shine through.

If you try working in the dark, they will question you.

So you keep the lights on until you can go home, and somehow, it’s only been 5 minutes since you last checked how much time you had left.

A decade later when you finally get home, you don’t even think about turning the living room lights on. Whatever light is there is bright enough.

You eventually shut down.

Photo by Rudi Endresen on Unsplash

Not realizing you never turned the lights off from work.

Emails and tasks followed you home. Harbingers of a work day that isn’t even here yet.

Eventually your alarm lets you know morning is here.

You’re still tired.

At least you think that’s the feeling.

Breakfast will have to wait, or else you’re going to be late.

This time you get to the office door, but the light switch wasn’t working.

So you keep the lights off the whole day, and realize working with them off is more your speed, but people still think something is wrong.

So the next day you figure out how to make people think the light is on.

You balance the switch just enough in the middle, that from far away, it looks on, even if you know it’s off.

A sacred position where your natural light is able to just enough, without running up the bill.