Refresh...refresh...we both had several windows open, trying to get tickets for the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum. The Museum missed a trick in not having queuing/waiting room technology in place - not so the British Museum, where I had a great experience with Member booking for the Bayeux Tapestry yesterday. Two years ago for Vermeer we missed out in the first release - but struck lucky somehow in the second release of tickets.

It was a fabulous show, culmination of many years of work - many windows-worth of spreadsheets, emails, designs, labels, web frames behind the scenes.

But it's windows of another sort that we associate most with Vermeer. Actual windows, glazed, always on the left of the painting. Letting in that distinctive light.

Clarifying, illuminating, stilling. Suddenly making the ordinary extraordinary in a moment's pause.

1 question

What windows might you open to shed some light on your situation?

2 ideas

Try the Johari window - a way of thinking about your self-awareness and the awareness that others have about you. The Johari window has four panes - the larger your "OPEN" pane is, the more likely others are to know you, understand you and respond to you in an honest and open fashion. I like this simple, interactive Word doc version of the tool so you can make it your own.

If you spend a lot of time on a computer (!), branching out with some additional keyboard shortcuts to add to the ones you're familiar with can be a gamechanger. Have a look at Windows/Microsoft and Mac. This week I've been mostly playing with windows key plus fullstop = emoji keyboard. :)

1 quote

Life may be seen through many windows, none of them necessarily clear or opaque, less or more distorting than any of the others. Isaiah Berlin, in Personal Impressions (1980)

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Image: Wikimedia; what New York's Met Museum says about the painting