I am close to reading 50 books for the half-year, and I am excited about the things I am building quietly. Recently, I invested in improving my environment design. I set up a walking pad near the television, I have a posture corrector in my chair, and I have an aluminum stand that makes sure my laptop’s screen stays at eye level when I do my work. It is amazing how these ridiculously small environmental changes make a huge difference to how I approach my daily grind.
Life has been good. Chill but Consistent Movements It’s been a half-month of predominant light walking workouts. I think this is the time where I really learn the value of slowing down. Brain fog is gone, the junk food consumption is starting to taper off naturally, and the weight is slowly but surely shedding itself along with it. I have a 2000-step minimum daily on my temporary smartwatch, and the current challenge is maintaining good sleep hours for recovery.
If you told me last year that watching 6 seasons of an awarded medical drama show is part of my learning and self-improvement for 2023, I’d probably scoff at you. But that is precisely what is happening. I remember watching one season of this show when I was still in college. That was a long time ago. I had some classmates who were psychology majors that time. They got inspired to become real doctors because of this show.
Summer is about to end here in Manila and we are experiencing the occasional drizzles ushering in the June rainy season. But my fever for my newfound routine has been going along swimmingly. The walking pad I bought from Shopee has been a godsend; even on days I did not hit my 8 hours of sleep, I still manage to do a light physical activity to jumpstart my morning. Much of the brain fog has been reduced, my usage of my gadgets have been intentional, and nobody has been hijacking my attention on my inboxes lately.
I do not think there is ever a mother who never had to deal with a child’s fever. It is a rite of passage. Lucky you if it falls on a work day where you spend the evenings doing sentry duty with a thermometer and paracetamol. I consider myself fortunate that I have flexibility of hours to take breaks to administer meds and log symptoms during the day. There are others who have to commute after not sleeping for nights.
I had a different 2023 summer. The previous years had been more eventful. Today, I am at the end of my coding and project tasks and will be on my way to visit the wake of my bestfriend’s brother. My bestfriend just came from a long flight. It’s surreal when the person who died is 6 years younger than us. I kept remembering the time he helped us get to the hangar for my bestfriend’s Balesin birthday weekend.
Daybreak in Zurich It was autumn and the middle of October. I was looking at signages in German and relied on icons and arrows to get me to the right places. The second part of the flight was delayed. Some random (and likely bored) guy was broadcasting angry smileys and weird pictures via Airdrop. It was midday there, few people knew I was awake since 2 am because I had grad school classes in Manila.
I am currently on a two-week break for my health. After I hosted the 2021 Pista ng Mapa (Philippine Festival of Maps) last Saturday and finished grad school finals week with a grade of 99%, I crashed and found myself running on empty. Actually, I was no longer running by Sunday evening. I was just emptied out. Forced to rest in bed and let go of my usual Herculean work load, I finally had time to reflect in my solitude and unpack the events from the last 12 months of my life.
Grief and Healing Earlier this week, I attended a Zoom novena Mass of a data science mentor’s father who passed away due to covid-19. My mentor and I did not exactly part in the most amicable of terms last year due to a misunderstanding but we got restored earlier this week. I am taking this tiny development in my personal relationships as a spark of good although it transpired in the most weird and saddest of circumstances.
Lately, I have been noticing a fluctuation in my productivity levels. Instead of fighting it, I began to try to understand it and work on it with a pinch of self-compassion and self-care. This month has been particularly challenging because I am in a career transition and I needed to meet both existing commitments and prepare for a new chapter at the same time. The simultaneous demands did require me to consolidate my entire life management system into a combination of a few technology tools: Cloud Storage for PARA system folder, Notion personal knowledge management system, and Monday boards for project tracking.