Tag: #selfdevelopment

A Regression to a Younger Age

It’s been a strange August. I think it’s been a bit weird for everyone.
Perhaps I’m a nostalgic millennial, but I miss the simpler days of the school summer holidays. Admittedly, my family rarely went on holidays, but at least it felt like a seasonal pause from school work.
August no longer seems to have that feeling of being a real break. Everything seems to be in constant motion. The chase for productivity is winning out against periodic rest.
My life has seemingly regressed to a similar style of living as I had when I was young. Perhaps it’s my way of searching for creature comforts, even if the comforts weren’t all that comfortable. In my youthful summers, I spent most of my time playing video games feeling pretty isolated from the world. My current situation does feel remarkably similar.

Entering My Aura Farming Era

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 […]

The virtue of appreciating the small wins

A few days ago, I went to the cash machine, then walked directly to the supermarket. I bought a full load of groceries and walked back home.
I had no major fatigue or back pain flaring up. Believe it or not, this was notable progress.
It sounds so insignificant, but in the context of what I’ve been experiencing, this is a sign that I can slowly rely on my body again. It’s also incrementally more than I’ve been able to do in the last few weeks, and a much better bodily response than I’ve had in years.

Surrendering to the winds of the world

For the first time, I played with the notion that I may never recover. Perhaps the energy of old will never return. My new existence is one of exhaustion and management.

This may sound defeatist, but I don’t think it is. I do believe that I will recover, slowly, but surely. But considering how long this has gone on, and realistically how far off anyone’s expectation this has been, it’s not beyond the realms of possibility to think that I may never get better.

Rather than sounding bleak, there is a sense of simplifcation that comes with such a thought. No longer do I need to constantly find this something that I need to fight. No longer do I need to feel like I am delaying my life to a magical ‘when’ time. It allows me to be present, and not worry too much about the future. There is a freedom in this.

An ode to old school methods

For one reason or another, I started learning sanskrit this week.

I use an online language platform called Italki. It’s basically a place where you can find teachers and organise classes online. It’s where I also found my Bengali teacher too.

I took a chance and went with a teacher who was a lot older. His profile said he had taught in Sanskrit for over forty years. It was a slightly chaotic profile, far from the slicker, more polished video presentation you get from others.

I’ve had two classes with this teacher so far. His teaching method goes against most rules around modern western education pedagogy.

Connecting the fragments back together

Each of us has our own ‘personal narrative’. It reflects how we see ourselves, and so also how we see the world. For example, some people speak with a timidness. They talk about how they’re nothing special. To them, they had a ‘boring’ upbringing.

It’s not a surprise that such people aren’t particularly proud about where they’re from. Nor do they tend to be as confident either.

Compare that to someone who has a much more involved story about how they grew up. Their tales of upbringing can sound like a dazzling adventure.

The big irony is that these two stories could be the exact same person. It’s not really the history that matters, but the story crafted from it.

This is something I’ve understood. I’ve worked hard to shift my personal narrative from one that feels quite tragic to one of growth. Yet the last few weeks have also demonstrated a further layer that I never realised. My personal narrative was missing large segments.

On rekindling the flame of desire

One of the big potential traps in modern day society is to lose that spark.

It’s particularly visible in a city like Brussels. So many people come here with big hopes and expectations. The reality of the clunking system can be pretty soul crushing if we’re not careful.

It’s also very visible. When we look people in the eyes, we can see if there is a spark behind it or not. Once someone has lost their spark, it feels like their soul has been tuned down to power-save mode.

Whilst burnout is often assumed to be about overwork, it can just as well be a loss of hope. That was certainly the case for me. Day by day, I had my desires ever increasingly compromised. By the end, I had little will to leave my bed.

A Sunday morning of tidying up the office

Empty Sunday mornings are pretty good days to do some tidying.

I’ve accumulated so many bits of paper in the last few years that it has started to overflow. My office space has become generally noisy, to the point where the clutter has become a mainstay on desk spaces.
A tidy-up has been very much overdue. And whilst I would like to pretend that I have such saintly energy that I just simply decided to tidy, the truth was that I pushed myself into it. Last night, I spent about an hour looking for my old passport. Turns out, I needed to find an old visa number stamped on it.

I left half the papers on the floor. I had made it so messy that I forced my own hand in needing to tidy it up this morning.