Introspection

Having a honeymoon is awesome for many non-obvious reasons.

One of those is having two weeks where, for the most part (those parts not engaged in vigorous activity) you do nothing but think.  I spent a lot of time thinking — about life, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it.  Getting priorities straight.

A curious thing occurred to me: my current job is kicking my ass.  It’s hard, it’s long, and this week is the first week I’ve not been on a fucking plane to a different city in over seven months.  I love the people I work with and the company I work for, but I feel jetlagged all the time.  Worse, I feel disconnected from the stuff that’s really important: my wife, my friends, our family.  So, working on changing that … I’ve started a dialogue inside the company to see what options exist for not being on a plane, and lo!  I have now spent a week not on a plane.  Praise be.

I also got to read a lot, which was great.  I give five stars to Seveneves, four stars to Dark Intelligence (even Asher is finding life is kicking his ass), and four stars to Jane McGonigal’s excellent Reality is Broken.  Hang on, four stars, but it’s excellent?  Let me sum up.  The first two thirds of the book are amazing, revelatory, and explain so much about why e.g. work places suck balls, and why you feel the way you do.  The last third sucks a star out because it’s a bit of a stretch to arrive at her conclusions, and I didn’t find the delve into augmented gaming all that interesting.  But you need to read it anyway for the first two thirds, because it really will change your life.

One of the life changing things that it did was to re-affirm things like my love of writing, challenge, interesting people, and so on.  It also helped me understand why I was in such a funk over my martial arts: a relative lack of achievement and progression.  Thus, I’ve decided to take a backseat on that for a while and investigate other physical things I can find challenging and learn from — maybe dance, or parkour.  It’ll be tricky fitting those in around work, but ref: point 1 above, I’m looking for remediation there.

It was nice to have the simple time to think.  We’re some of the effected people who are getting our houses bulldozed, and that’s not an easy thing to deal with — but the time to think means we’ve managed to find the upsides in the situation, and are now much more philosophical about the change than anything else.  We’re almost where want it to hurry up and happen to get it behind us, and onto new things.

If you’re sitting there in a bit of a funk and wondering what is going on, maybe you just need a bit of thinking time too.  Take a break from life, go somewhere with no Wi-Fi, and run at a single thread for a while.  Life won’t run faster than your refresh rate anymore, and you’ll come back tanned, fat, and with your head on straight.