You know, life’s a funny thing. I’m about to say so much that’s inappropriate for one reason or another, but it’s the truth.
January/February: Filing my life into my JD system. If it works and stays robust for a whole year without tinkering, then I’m happy. If it doesn’t, and I realize I need to tinker with it again, it’s time for therapy. (Only half joking) I’ve spent so much time working on an “ideal” system that I’ve postponed so much work/goals. Some of it ended up being a good thing, some goals would have just been Sisyphean wastes of time. Others, I wish I did. So no more tinkering. It’s time to “put up”, as the saying goes.
March/April: Setup a weekly sports routine. For about six years now I’ve been struggling to play the sports I am used to (badminton, squash, football). It’s just, between two inter-continental moves, getting a dog, changing jobs four times, I’ve struggled to find a consistent physical routine/group for exercise. In those months, I’ll give a try to just succeed at any one of the sports. If I fail, I just retire from those as sources of fun, and open up myself to the idea that there are other sports I can start playing now that are better suited to my life and stage (thinking about picking up some body-weight training rings and floor bars).
May/June: The great culling. It will hurt a bit, but I’m going to minimize my life and the stuff in it. I’m probably ending up with unused sports equipment from the above, and a clearer view of how my hobbies and spare time should be spent (for example if I learn to pay attention to what’s actually available to do in my free time). There will be two rules here. Rule 1 is “Do I still do X?” and Rule 2 is “Is this item the thing I actually use to do X, or is it a thing that I got to do X in a specific way that’s just a resource drain?”
Hoping to finish the first half of my year with a clear head and lighter heart… for…
July/August: Self-expression months. I hope to put my blog back up, and work on a personal research project. For years I’ve been saying I want to do “science” as a “citizen”, not as a professional, and I’ve carved these months out to get out there and do something “casually” without pressure of results or publication. I mean, publishing as a series of blog posts, but not with any real academic rigor. I hope to come up with a field-friendly protocol to do an inter-dependent biome analysis (how much of bird biodiversity can I predict from forest floor biodiversity is the question). It’s the kind of dumb question that no one ought to do as a serious scientist because the experiment can fail spectacularly and technically on every level. But, I want to find out for myself if I can ever do science in my spare time, or if it’s just a professional thing, and I need to look for sources of meaning elsewhere.
September/October: Based on the results of the above, I’m planning to either take music classes, or setup a solo board gaming habit. For years I’ve told myself I’d like to learn how to play music because having one additional “axis” of “creativity” and “self-expression” in my life. It would make life feel richer, it would make me think outside the box, yadda yadda. But it’s always somewhere on the horizon. If I won’t derive meaning from “work”, then I’ll take this chance of a new understanding of myself to try a new branch of life. If work ends up being surprisingly meaning-friendly, then I’ll just use my spare time/energy to enjoy puzzles/logical games in my spare time for tickling my curiosity in unexpected ways. No need for learning a whole new skillset and starting another story.
November/December: The heavy one. My partner might move again. If she does, we’ve left it as a question mark as to where we end up on a personal level. I’m not going to move again. At least not for 5 or so years. If she stays, I propose. If she leaves, we have a real conversation about how much of a relationship can be spent long distance, as it would be our second time doing it.
Maybe this got too personal, and maybe I delete this post in a month, because I’m not sure how much of my personal life I want publicly available on a forum. But then again, maybe we all ought to be more open and expressive in life, to let one another know that it’s all a big mess, and nobody knows anything.
For a lighter topic;
I have kept up my reading habit.
I’ve now read Ted Chiang’s Exhalation. I so recommend the first two short stories “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,”, “Exhalation,” and the last short story, “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom,” for everyone to read. He likes to write about worlds with one or two facts from our own flipped, and from there there’s an expansion about how we ought to live life earnestly regardless of how trapped we may feel or be.
I also read Sir Paul Nurse’s What is Life?. Paul’s of course one of the greatest living scientists, but I think he should have written three books instead of this one. There are three audiences he tries to address simultaneously, and for that, the book is weaker. I’d be curious if any non-biologists ever read it what they would think. I thought the ramp-up of jargon was too quick for the book to serve as anything of an introduction to biological sciences.
Finally, I also read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld 4 - Mort. My first reading in this classic series. I can see why it is so loved. I’ll likely read another book in the series just for the joy of having so much fun while reading. Not sure if it will become a habit, but certainly I want another dose.
Still reading Anna Karenina… beautiful, not shallow, full of joie de vivre, but goodness, I might fail at finishing this book again. Ha.
