Do you have a lunch break habit? If you work from 8am-5pm on weekdays, you probably get 1 hour of free time to eat or whatever you wanna do! For years, I have treated my lunch break as just a "time to eat" moment, where I would rush finishing my food to get back to work again, or probably to take a short nap. Sometimes even, I would stay in my cubicle in front of my computer to still do work stuff while I'm munching on my lunch... which I realized is not the best thing to do. Until I discovered that I can do more fun stuff during this seem-to-be-short-but-significant 1 hour. A month ago I started to pack up and go out for lunch in Rustan's Alphaland Ayala Ave with my lunch (or sometimes I would buy lunch/milktea from there), my wallet, water and the most exciting part is the Book of the Season, which for now is "The Life You've Always Wanted" (I'm almost done reading it). I have never enjoyed lunch breaks until I learned to eat and read, savoring every spoonful and chewing every thought. I treat it as a date, most of the time with God, when the book seem to really speak to me as if it were God telling me the thoughts.
The reason though that I'm writing this post is not because of my newly-discovered habit but the strange experience that happened while I'm at it. Dec 10 is not a typical lunch break though. There's not much seats in Rustan's and I happened to asked to share a table with 2 seemingly young professionals. I placed my food on the shared table and plugged my earphones and tuned into my spotify playlist. Not so much after, the woman I'm sharing the table with expressed her intention of sharing a conversation, too. Despite the absolute fact that I love to be alone, I'm still open to wonders that could happen when I share time with people, especially strangers. So I closed my book and released my ears from my earphones and we had a stranger's conversation, her and his friend. Jeatte and Earl.
So we talked about our professions and the common denominator is we're all working for the IT industry. I somehow pitched my Microsoft Cloud strategies with them. We touched a lot on hobbies and I discovered these people are wanderlusts as well. I mean, they're the real thing because they really have gone out a lot and plans for their 2015 travels are sure. I, however, am the dreamer wanderlust. So far, they're still all in my head/heart as dreams. It's amazing also how at one point Jeatte said, "Can I ask you something, I'm just curious. Are you a Christian?." I'm really not sure what made her ask me that, I'm not sure if it's the book I was reading because she seemed like she didn't know about it. But it's amazing to have been asked that question again. She, btw, claims to be a Christian too. I have to be back at the office by 1pm though so our conversation ended with a promise to connect through Facebook again.
And this event led me to the idea of creating a blog series called "The Lunch Break Chronicles." Maximize lunch time while the season is still there :)
