Author: neil

There are moments we question our selves, question our motivations, our purpose, and the circumstances we are in. Often they are isolated questions.  Sometimes, there’s a confluence of all of them, and it leads an almost immediate visceral reaction to the situation.

It happened to me today. The details are immaterial. The emotion it triggered immediately was a crisis of confidence in my own self. It’s been stewing for a while in my subsconscious perhaps, but I found myself having retreated into a shell, feeling unable to respond, unable to speak coherently.

Fortunately for me, I have a few – can be counted on one hand – friends I can reach out to and who I can count on to listen to me, support me, and yet challenge my perspective, or show me an alternate frame of reference. I got all of them today, and for that I’m truly grateful. I have a few things to work on myself, including forgiving myself when I’ve screwed up in my thinking. Weeks of ill-health have taken a toll on me, and have been exacerbated by a distinct sense of disappointment in the behaviour of a person I believed and trusted in (also something I was helped through by another friend today to process).

Finally getting the 11-year old vaccinated today, before schools reopen in a couple of weeks, was a relief, given how challenging it is in the current clusterfuck climate. Double vaccination was always going to be unlikely before school reopened but knowing that it is not that far away is comforting.

Listening to a great speech is  a wonderful way to start the day – after a grand total of 2 pushups!  Deconstructing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Danger of a Single Story” into a storytelling pattern was the icing on the cake (the phrase because my dear friend AJW is sharing pictures and ideas for their wedding cake!)

Narratives and stories have a powerful hold over everything we do, and in ways we don’t imagine. Listening to several people today, I was reminded how much everything around us is made up, and the social construct that allows us to live the fiction we want for ourselves. Money is the one we’ve all strongly bought into, and the narratives are powerful enough to divide us, despite how much we all collectively share in common.

A new year brings with it new narratives (?) or at least that’s how I’m seeing things, my own narrative about new year narratives. Corporate honchos are all back this week everywhere, and I see posts on that corporate social media about how the ‘new normal’ is here, and we’ve ‘learned to live with it’ and the wonderful things ‘we will accomplish this year’ and how it’s only possible through ‘collaboration and working as one team’. On the other hand, the narrative from the staff worker is wanting to ‘get out of this rat race’, and ‘do something on my own’, and ‘I don’t know what that is but this isn’t it’. I miss David Graeber and take solace around this time of year in his article in Strike Magazine titled “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs“:

Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.

Sprint (v): run at full speed over a short distance, (n):an act or short spell of running at full speed.

Verb or noun, the last two weeks have flown by! The first of 26 sprints for 2022 was a good start, and I went a fair bit along what I wanted to learn.  I have kept up the daily writing habit, both here and in my journal, stretched my Spencerian writing into a longer quote that requires more strength, coordination and consistency, and I’ve kept up the `git` practise with R Markdown too.

I also found that taking a day off has been helpful, even when the weather has not (it’s been hot and humidity at 100% is an energy sapper!) My sleep patterns have still not gotten back to more reasonable hours – last night I was awake in bed until nearly 4am, and woke up at 9 this morning. This next sprint is a focus on just two things:

1. 1. (Re)uild sleep habits; specifically go to bed by 11 pm and read a book if I can’t sleep, and wake up by 6am
   2. Before I turn on the computer, do a push-up. Start at one.

There are of course other things to do during this sprint, most of which involve a computer screen (tax returns, investment reviews, create another presentation in xaringan from the great speeches).  The non-screen time efforts are sorely necessary, particularly on mobile. I’m spending 2-4 hours a day on top of the time I spend at the computer(s)!

There are times when we get so engrossed in something that all sense of time disappears. Flow, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it.  The humidity, the hunger, none of them matter – just the task at hand. And a sense of satisfaction, joy at the end of it.

It was wonderful today to be in that zone. Learning how to use Notion, while building a structure of all the radio station requirements that I see at varying levels of grain, sometimes getting into the hairy details that most of my fellow volunteers won’t have a clue how to even think about but the kind of stuff that gets me all excited 🙂

I have had – and will continue to have – people scoff at the effort I put into these things. Why bother, they ask, why do you do the work?

I like how Seth Godin calls it “The way we make things better is by caring enough about how we serve to imagine the story that they need to hear.” In the meanwhile, I’m also building skills that I don’t often get to stretch and develop at work. I think it’s worth the effort.

Second-hand bookstores are a goldmine. Besides suiting my thrifty nature, they offer a haven for my meandering reading tastes. Libraries do that too, of course, and for the last decade or so, libraries have been the mainstay of supply for my physical medium reading urges.

Today, finally, I managed to make my <10th trip to our local second-hand bookstore. The store has moved from the last time I visited them over 3 years ago – business is clearly booming. I overheard the owner tell another customer they’ve opened up another store in a nearby suburb too, and that too is getting busier. The smell of books, piled up to the ceiling, in shelves that groaned under the weight of the books yet stood tall, fellow readers who were happy to chat – the half hour flew by so quickly that I was almost late for my next appointment.

And of course, I found a few books that I want on my bookshelf- Richard Feynman’s lectures, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow, and Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. I’ve borrowed and read these books multiple times over the last few years, and I have been encouraging the kids to read them too, now available on Dad’s bookshelf 🙂

* The title was stolen: it was the name of an used bookstore that I would frequent on my commute when that was the thing to do!