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hope I can

2023-08-03

3 minute read

Feeling like there's not enough time to do all that I want to do, and I want to do so much. I think I always feel this way, but now it's more visceral than other times. It's funny because I also felt this way when I was unemployed. It gives me hope that it's not so much tied to my actual time as to my ability to use it, and so maybe I can with effort and persistence wrangle in the always pending tasks and, though not dominate them, bring them into some kind of order. Maybe I'll spend the rest of my life putting my things into order, and then I'll put myself into order and die.

order

Work is slowly heaping up, and it's reaching a critical mass now that I can actually reflect on and make improvements on. The hard part - make improvements. I can't believe how hard it is to focus at work, and I feel like I only achieve real concentration in the late afternoon, as my energy is waning. There is so much scope for improvement at work, which is exciting, but also daunting. It is nice though to really see and feel the limits, and identify ways around them. Stepping up to the challenge. Hope I can!

hope I can

It's a little scary realising that this is a real job and comes with career expectations and what not. I want to quit again, I want to leave this country, I want to be somewhere else doing something else for some other reason. The grass is so green over there on the other side. I guess I really need to hone some skills and achievements that will put it a good place to leave, if I actually need to. I'll make some private plans for the next couple of years, put together a scope of work.

scope of work (not the newsletter)

I finished "ways of being". It's a good read and inspiring, but fills me with a sense of urgency I feel incapable of handling. The truth of the environment, of the way we live and the systems we live in is so grim and so frightening, yet so impossible to act on in a day-to-day way. "Fingir demencia" is a phrase I learnt in Argentina - "To fake/pretend insanity". It refers to the state of mind required to get on with the prosaic things and not fall apart while everything around you ostensibly is falling apart.

One thing I've learnt from small practice is that I can get past the fear and into a place of reckoning, if I'm willing to go through the discomfort. It's hard to bring myself to go through the discomfort though. I see a headline: "No way of slowing what's coming", "Scientists warn of terrible things" or something of this nature. I hate reading this, it makes me feel sick. Everytime I do read it though, like I said, I manage to come out the other end like "ok now what". I remember a scene in one of the stories from Acá Empieza a Deshacerse el Cielo where the main character is alone in a foreign country in the middle of a global and devastating pandemic (covid-esque, I know, but of an even greater severity and damage) and she's just kind of there. Writing letters to no-one, surviving. I can't remember where I was going with this. I'd love to have a go translating a paragraph.

what else

I'm back running again, after being sick. I'd like to start climbing again soon.

listening to

K-POP - Travis Scott, Bad Bunny, The Weeknd

questions