Some Kind of Accelerating Animal

I'm not sure whether it's more apt to say "like a horse coming back to the barn" or "like a cockroach approaching the end of the maze" but I've been increasingly productive at my job ever since I decided that July 6 would be my last day at work.

And several days ago, when only my team-mate K suspected that I was on the cusp of leaving, and when things were getting super-crazy and should have been making me stressed out and annoyed, a couple different people remarked that I was exuding a sense of calmness and sanity over the entire process.

It is rather disconcerting to consider that I am actually enjoying my job more right now, in my last few weeks, than I have for some time. But maybe this is a positive thing, given the peak-end rule of memory bias, which states that we judge our experiences based on how good or bad they were at their peak of intensity and how they were at the end. (My and Robert's tennis instructor was a good practitioner of cognitive strategy by telling us students that we should always end our practice/game on a good shot - thus exploiting the recency effect such that we will remember the practice as having been a good experience in which we excelled.) Perhaps I will look back at this job and remember how fantastic it was (there for a while) and how satisfied I was with it as it drew to a close and think, Yeah, that was a pretty much great gig. And of course, that will be accurate because I remember it as being ... oh well, I guess it's already happening.