Everything is connected

(More stream of consciousness than my usual blog posts, inspired by some poetry I've been reading and life!!!)

Things that you do are not isolated. This is why small things can have big effects. Like parenting. And also proving things to yourself.

That's why I like taking walks so much. Everything is a metaphor. The cliché of the journey is more important than the destination. That's why I do weird things on my walks too, like turn around abruptly, walk backwards, skip, sing, etc.

I know this is true because I've seen the effects of standing up for myself in one area of my life manifest in others.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A thought on beauty

The word beauty is overloaded: it’s used to describe both “outer beauty” and “inner beauty.” Inner beauty is pretty much an unobjectionable idea. Of course we all want to be good people! But why does inner beauty have to have any relationship to outer beauty? C.f. quotes about “true beauty comes from within.” Even if outer beauty does reflect inner beauty, I don’t understand why the relationship is drawn at all, other than the fact that the two ideas happen to share a common word! This is also why I find messages like “strong is beautiful,” “skinny is beautiful,” etc. so problematic. Although well-meaning (whatever that counts for!), in an attempt at inclusivity, they reinforce the idea that outer beauty—rather than inner beauty—is something that should be universally sought.
Read more

Doing pomodoros is changing my life

For people who don't know what pomodoros are, they're basically alternating periods of work + break (usually 25 min working / 5 min break), and there are a bunch of desktop and mobile pomodoro apps that you can get. I've known about pomodoros for a pretty long time but only started doing them after learning more about them when I took the Learning How to Learn online course  while I was at RC. Even then, I never fully incorporated them into my work until this past month. I feel like doing pomodoros has changed my life in a big time way, by making me more aware of both the passage of time and my own mental state. For instance, now I can set daily goals for myself like "work on cos pset for 3 pomodoros," which allows me not only to break down big (and undesirable) tasks into manageable daily chunks, but also to become more aware of how long it takes me to do certain parts. Not only that, but I'm now also more aware of how many things I can actually do during the...
Read more

Environment and frameworks and affordances

The most basic form of this idea is the question of how to make it easy for yourself to do something. This is an important question, because when we are trying to grow, a way that we can accomplish that is by changing  our actions and reactions. Almost all of the time, I will have some sort of mental or emotional block around making those changes, and even if I didn't, because of the inertia of my normal ways of being, making these changes necessarily takes effort. An idea that has been useful for me in this domain for several years has been the one of affordances, from design. An affordance is a "quality or property of an object that...makes clear how it can or should be used." [1]  One of the canonical examples of affordances is a door knob—the shape of a well-designed door knob affords turning. By clarifying the ways to use an object through intuitive design, an affordance makes it easy to interact with the object in the intended way. Similarly, we can create affordanc...
Read more