Today I managed to wake up at 6AM, get out of the house, and immediately launch into project work before checking my email. Such days always feel super-productive, because by the time 10AM rolls around you’ve gotten a good chunk of work out of the way. By noon I’d not only caught up with the most pressing project tasks, but I’d also achieved INBOX ZERO for the first time EVER. Holy cow!

After that, I packed up my computer and headed home, slurping on my free Iced Coffee refill (one of the last remaining Starbucks Gold Card membership perks) for a call with a potential new client. By noon, my mind had acquired that “delicately-fried” feeling, which I recognize now as mental fatigue. Food helps dispel that feeling, apparently, by restoring the brain with carbohydrates, so I started up some brown rice in the rice cooker. As this takes an hour, I wondered what to do while I waited.

I decided, on a whim, to clean out my dish drying rack, as it had developed a “bachelor pad patina” over its nominal plastic whiteness. As I cleared the dishes from it and scrubbed the sink, I noticed that my mental fatigue was fading; was it possible that the change of pace from thinking to non-thinking was helping me regenerate?

Encouraged, I deployed Whirlwind, a kind of magic spell (as I think of it) I learned from the family of my cousin. There are three such spells that I know of, and I thought it would be worthwhile to share them.

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