My mornings used to read like this: wake up, check phone for messages, shower, put on clothes, put in headphones, get to work. Robotic. Repetitive. I used headphones to block out the world around me. But by blocking it out, I was missing out on what was happening around me. A real catch-22 situation. So, when I got to work at 9 a.m. and stayed in the office until 5 p.m., I had no interaction with the "outside world" during the daylight hours. Taking out my headphones in the morning was a small step in my personal journey of discovering my immediate environment.