I’m hoping all of you had a wonderful evening and a restful, pleasant morning. May your entire year be one long happy memory in the making!
I think 2012 is going to surprise me, and I mean in the “what a great present!” kind of way, not the “holy shit run for your life!” kind of way.
This past week, starting on the 26th (day after Christmas), I went on an “at home retreat” where I signed off of all social networks online, put all of my many, many “to-do!!!!!” lists aside, and spent time every day meditating and throwing the i-ching as a way to get myself to do some creative inner reflection. While I’m an introvert by nature, I’m somewhat of a knee-jerk one, so being mindful of where my thoughts go takes work!
I’m facing a semester that will mark the beginning of the end of grad school for me, in that it will be last actual classes I need to graduate. I have to do an internship yet, which I hope to knock out over the summer, but this spring is IT for the heavy lifting part of my master’s degree. And believe me, I’m ready for it be over. Anyway the semester is going to be busy and stressful, so I really needed to take this past week and spend it looking at my past, present, and future.
I’ve realized some important things, first-most being that my health is really important to me. I want to spend time doing yoga, riding my bike, and living primally. The whooping cough of the last month and my schedule before that put that priority on the back burner, but I need it to be FIRST. Before grad school, before my jobs, before everything. If my health suffers, everything else crumbles, the end. So I’ve rededicated myself to that, and it feels great.
The other important thing I realized is that going for my PhD is probably not in my best interests. Not right now, anyway. Maybe not ever. I’ve kind of been on this gradschool road thinking, “well, it’s a good thing to do until I can start living my life” and that’s kind of ass-backwards.I really love love LOVE information studies, particularly the history of text technology, and intend to stay in the field, but my goals have changed.
It’s time for me to stop doing “important stuff” for the sake of legitimacy, or credentials, or others’ approval, while putting what is important to me on shelf to get to later. You would think I already know better, after the deaths of my parents and all, but no, I’ve been running on that hamster wheel so long that getting off of it required a lot of concentration and focus.
So what am I going to do with my life? I’m not ready to share that answer yet. I have ideas, and I have a dream of how I’d like to live my life, but the “what” is still pretty new and fragile. It’s nothing I’m not already doing, tbh, but it’s not stuff I’ve looked at as “this is my life, YAY!” even though I feel that way about those projects.
I’m energized and optimistic, which both takes work for me to achieve. What a great way to start the year! Here is hoping that fantastic things come our way all year ’round!
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