Running Sucks
Managing Change
I have always been one to enjoy change. Change often means good things can happen. Change often means a new opportunity to grow, which often comes with pain. We don’t get to choose our change, but we do get to seek out learning from it.
As more change is on the horizon for me, I need to work through my own feelings of change and then help communicate and deliver them to others who often like change less than I do.
Civilized Progress
It’s sometimes argued that there’s no real progress; that a civilization that kills multitudes in mass warfare, that pollutes the land and oceans with ever larger quantities of debris, that destroys the dignity of individuals by subjecting them to a forced mechanized existence can hardly be called an advance over the simpler hunting and gathering and agricultural existence of prehistoric times. But this argument, though romantically appealing, doesn’t hold up.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
This is a book I had read mainly in two parts. The first part was at the start of 2022. I had heard many great things about this novel and thought I should give it a go, but I gave in to the weight of Russian literature. It had really bothered me that I did not finish reading it and so I went for it last month. It is such a bleak book and as Clifford Lee Sargent mentions in his review, it is two pages of crime and over five hundred pages of punishment.
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
In my youth I had dabbled with Mountaineering. This was a book I considered luxurious to consume. It is a well written book and well regarded. I walked away feeling horrible as the author must have felt and conveyed to the reader. So much tragedy and so much helplessness in witnessing the events unfold. This book took about a week to recover from. It was quite intense. I also cannot say this lit an adventure fire under me, but perhaps the timing was wrong.
Moose out front should have told you
Motivation
I have spent a fair amount of time over the last month questioning my motivation around wanting to write and share on this site. I had considered moving this content over to a site under my name. The real problem is in exploring the need to publish my thoughts. I don’t see this as a creative act. I see this more as a structure for my own benefit. Write it and move on.
Phone Break
I had spent a full week last month taking a break from my phone. I do have a watch which delivers notifications to my wrist as I want to be there for the people who are important to me, but there is enough friction in the watch that I find little distraction in it. I keep my phone in the drawer and I will use it for a few things like looking at the weather radar, logging calories, or answering a more complicated text message.
Quote
I do nothing, granted. But I see the hours pass – which is better than trying to fill them.
– E.M. Ciorian from The Trouble With Being Born
Struggling
I have taken a month off (from here) because I have been struggling in all aspects of life. It has been a confluence of travel throwing my whole routine off, work has been stressful with uncertainty, holidays with all of the commotion that brings, a foot injury that has kept me from where I want to be physically, and generally struggling with my relationships to others and myself. The way I have been trying to get through this is to remember this is not how I will feel forever.