<aside> <img src="/icons/circle-dashed_gray.svg" alt="/icons/circle-dashed_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Now
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Comfortably engrained on my to-do list for months on end.
The task, of course, is literally to update this “now” page.
What is literally now happening, I think, is that I’m anticipating a phase change. That feeling when time becomes gets super compressed, then releases before it repeats that cycle again. Think finals then summer break.
While it’s hard to know exactly whats going to happen next, I feel like we often sense when something big is coming. Albeit not always accurately. Maybe we and need to develop that muscle? Would love someone to teach me.
I’m wondering what happens during a phase change in life that makes it a phase change? How can we describe it in words? It might sound super unscientific. But that might not be a problem.
Maybe it has something to do with groove. The idea of grooving. Groovy. You’re in it and you can’t stop. It’s almost beyond your control. As if it’s not you thats grooving, but in fact it is you that’s being grooved. Man be bewitched, man be begrooved.
And if that’s how a groove feels, and of course this comes from a vinyl reference—what happens when you have to lift the needle to change records? What’s our living equivalent of the scratchy wisp of the needle before a tune? What’s it feel like when the needle skips?
I feel like soon my needle will need to be lifted to flip the record. Side B. And like a track before the it fades out, this week will likely be a big crescendo. All instruments get to play. Everyone solo. That’s what now feels like.
When the sound fades for a brief moment, life will be a scratchy wisp. And for that I can’t wait.
07/28/2024
I have a bad habit when it comes to work, when I’m confronted with a large or unknown task.
What happens is, when I’m either daunted by the volume of that task or afraid that I don’t know how exactly to proceed, I basically freeze and don’t get started on the thing.
It still needs to get done, and I’ll eventually do it, but it gets pushed until the last minute and while sometimes a deadline unleashes a freakish amount of action potential as it we near it, quality is the first to be compromised.
For example, let’s say I have a first round deck to make for a brand’s updated messaging territories, and I know I’ll have to dig into all of the provided and public resources, the amount of effort I sense it will take kind of scares me and I’ll “freeze” into procrastination mode.
Logically, if I know it will take time, due to the nature of the task, I will break it into parts and treat them each like a minitask. That way I’m making incremental progress, can check in with the team, get feedback, and ultimately either get a higher quality thing done or I’ll get to go to sleep earlier. Or not have to get up early to finish it.
My boss did say that was kind of normal—not the procrastinating part but the deadline unleashing a next-level focus and energy. But perhaps that is ideally used to refine the product instead of merely “finishing” it.
I think a possible step in a positive direction will be to just do a little tiny bit of upfront work a little earlier. And break tasks/decks into parts or sections. That way we can work towards a habit in which: when I receive a task, I take the tiniest first crack at it almost immediately, noting the constituent parts and ways to approach it in the future.
K cool. I need to get back to that deck.
06/30/2024
During the past year, Aya and I transitioned out of living in Tokyo, spending the majority of the year in my family-run Buddhist temple in southern Japan.
We worked from home, helping with the day-to-day of running a temple, and began strategizing our move to the US. Before having kids, we’d want to establish Aya’s visa situation that allows us to travel fluidly between Japan and the US.
San Francisco is a home I have never lived in. My mother’s family is from the Bay Area, and we always visited family and friends there. It’s a region that offers both nostalgia and intrigue. While there are many beautiful places in the Bay, living in SF proper would be sweet, at least for a bit.
Conveniently, the city seems to cater well to both Aya and my work, hobbies, and interests. Herbalism and holistic health, movement culture, capoeira, dining in and out, dancing, pot, pottery, nature, alternative thinking, optimization, Buddhism, technology, and psychedelics. Not to mention we have some great friends there.
While property costs seem to have passed their peak, SF remains to be one of the most expensive places to live, and the logistics of making it work is keenly on our minds. I’m in the process of transitioning into a career more adjacent to tech, and the upcoming year or two will likely involve a hustle to catch up with the knowledge and work style of a new industry.
Aya has been working remotely for a Japanese travel company, which would be a solid gig—if it paid more. Most Japanese salaries would not sustain city life in the US, so that will require an update once the visa situation is taken care of.
Meanwhile, there are so many things I want/need to learn. In order to stay on top of my Buddhist minister training, I am writing the sutras every morning. This barely serves to keep my monk muscles alive, but it’s certainly better than nothing. I’m currently working a project management certification and striving to establish a daily practice in both front- and back- end code to help manifest a software product I aim to develop over the coming years.
Capoeira has been the grounding force in my life, inspiring connection through movement.
There is a constant sense of not having enough time, a feeling originating from insufficient focus and prioritization. Must learn to dream with discipline.
12/31/2023
Learning is often imagined as strengthening and myelinating our synaptic connections, but a lot of learning worthwhile skills has more to do with undoing bad habits that keep you stuck in amateurland.
Most professional skills could be considered to be more of a divergence from the amateur skill set rather than an improvement upon it.
Think: how chefs chops onions, a calligrapher’s penmanship, or how a native speaks Spanish. They do things fundamentally differently from novices.
Illuminating that difference is the key roles of teachers.
And recognizing that difference is the key insight for us students.
12/25/2021
Something as basic as handwriting is not hard to improve incrementally, but quite hard to alter drastically.
With things we’ve done for so long, having a “foundation” makes it a frustrating endeavor to re-wire the mechanism in a fundamental way. Like learning to write with your opposite hand.
I hope this is the seed of true improvement.
I’m grateful to get deep first-hand experience (no pun intended) with a beginner’s mind—
Practice is humility.
12/14/2021
That 70’s rugby player look with sleeve cuffs not quite reaching the wrist—I thought was ridiculous. It was unbearably uncomfortable for me, and thought it looked supremely dorky. (In hindsight, all of my clothes back then erred towards dork.)
So when it came to layering, a big issue was this: how to grip the long sleeve without letting it slide up my forearm when putting on a layer above it. Inevitably, a tight fitting sweater will drive the loose fitting long sleeve shirt underneath so far up my forearm, that in my mind’s eye it might as well be stuck in my arm pit.
To avoid this, it was best practice to grip the sleeve of the undershirt with your middle and ring finger as not to let it get caught up in all of the evil brought forth by the tight sweater. An alarm is raised when the undershirt is insufficient in length as not to permit my fingers to maintain a grip.
The most tragic is when, like in the scene when Scar ripps Mufasa’s grip on the cliff in Lion King, when my sleeve cuffs shamefully get ripped away, the sweater taking hold of the undershirt with only inches left and sucks it into the abyss. Then follows a pathetic need for retrieval, knowing that similar dangers still lurk hungrily within the other sleeve.
This, along with the further need to align the seams (making sure the fabric is not twisted onto my limbs like a poisonous vine) were so attention-consuming during my youth. I felt like a puppet, being jerked around uncomfortably by an unpracticed puppeteer.
Writing this now, I feel like that’s either OCD or autistic vibes. For sure.
Thankfully those days have passed, and slowly my wardrobe is recovering like a grass field in the savannah after a wild fire.
I’ve come to learn that layering is as much of an art as it is a science…Lots of science.
Surely there must be folks who are of age to deal with mortgage payments and overdue oil changes who still struggle with such trivial intricacies that naturally accompany us mortals.
12/12/2021