Photo by Valentin Bolder on Unsplash I turned 33 today. For some, birthdays are about celebration, and having a moment to feel special. For others, it elicits a sense of worry, confronting us to the inevitable march of time. My somewhat surprising reaction when the clock struck midnight was a sense of lightness. I think […]
I’ve been intentionally looking to walk more. Walking more however can sound a little dumb. After all, most of us walk everyday. It’s become so programmed into our living that the idea of intentionally walking just sounds like adding more needless travel into our day.
Yet for me, I’m finding walking one of the most adapted and well-suited forms of exercise I’ve intentionally done.
I’ve returned to the UK for the weekend. Partly to see my parents. Partly because I couldn’t change my train ticket.
It is quite novel being back. This is the land of my birth after all. But I’ve been away for long enough now that it isn’t really my home, and I was always a bit too weird and ineligible to really fit in a whole lot anyway.
I don’t think people understand the layered nature of marginalisation. Some people have a broader understanding of intolerance, but it’s often assumed to be at the level of outright racism or obvious discrimination.
But behind the everyday interactions, there’s a whole layer of systems created based upon the mainstream assumptions. If you don’t fit in that mould, you often face an uphill struggle in many different areas of life.
Photo by Aliaksei Lepik on Unsplash In the past, I’ve bemoaned the lack of warmth people have. Maybe it’s a capital city thing, but the level of hyper-independence makes it nigh on impossible to have a sustained relationship with anyone. People are too emotionally unavailable, or too busy doing their own thing. Fast forward to […]
(Yes, I felt compelled to write about neurodivergence. And yes, I’m publishing this at 2am)
Most people have heard about yoga, but fewer know about ayurveda. If yoga is the physical and spiritual practice, ayurveda is the science of health, based upon practices refined over thousands of years in South Asia.
I’ve been experiencing a burnout, and I’ve found that our modern-day approaches are pretty poor. Ayurveda gave me the first systemic explanation of burnout that actually made sense.
This made my mind return to how this might map onto neurodivergence. As my brain ticked along, I realise that it actually maps up extremely well.
A key moment for learning is when things stop working properly.
Most of us have no idea how our car works. We don’t really need to either, so long as its functioning correctly.
But the moment something goes wrong, we decide to investigate. We open up the hood of the car, only to have the level of our ignorance be laid bare. We have no idea what we are looking at, nor how any of it really works. If we Time for us to learn quickly, else we be stuck on the side of the highway in the middle of the night.
I’m waking up with nausea. My back is flaring up. A fifteen minute walk is leaving me in agony. I’ve had to cancel on three social events this week.
I’ve regressed to the point that leaving the house seems like a risky endeavour. The nausea leaves my appetite in confusion. I know that I need to eat, but my sense of appetite is totally suppressed.
Such is the world of recovery. One week is good, another three weeks are difficult.
Last year, I stopped going to the gym. I had been going around two to three times a week. I had a personal trainer, who set me different strength exercises and increasing weight goals. On paper, I was doing everything I should have been.
Just before stopping, I got a blood test. Generally my health was good, but my cholesterol was particularly high. Most notably, my HDLs (the ‘good’ cholesterol) was quite a lot lower than they should have been.
If conventional wisdom were to be followed, my health should have gotten worse. I was no longer exercising, I stopped paying too much attention to diet and I returned to a very sedentary lifestyle.
Yesterday, Bangladesh had its national elections. But this was no ordinary elections, it was the first that was broadly fair and free in nearly two decades.
In the West, the idea of a free and fair election is taken for granted. So is the idea of general state stability. Post-colonial South Asian politics has no such luxury. Bangladesh has been mirred with in-fighting, coups and counter-coups throughout its young history. A descent into military rule has very much been on the cards over the last few years.
As such, these elections were historic. Nonetheless, the slight irony is that the results themselves feel somewhat anticlimactic to me. Although broadly peaceful and open elections are to be celebrated, reforms and genuine positive change will take a lot more hard, earnest work.