At the behest of Catherine and Vivian, we're all taking an hour or so to journal and reflect on the past year. It's the kind of activity I've come to expect from conferences or retreats, but not from a casual hangout; unexpected, but a nice change of pace.
Pandemic aside, there are a few overarching themes that I've been thinking about throughout the year.
I've been trying to work on self-discipline and setting habits, and hobbies have been a great proving ground for practicing consistency. I've settled on these as a kind of core set that I can see myself investing in long-term:
These cover a good range of benefits: physical health, social opportunities, creative expression, and growth potential. Ideally, I'd always have something to be excited about or work on, so that I'm never bored.
Considering the decades ahead has also helped me to transition into a more growth-based mindset. I've always been eager to jump into new things and equally quick to become disappointed when success doesn't come immediately; this year, I've learned to practice on the scale of months rather than days. The most notable progress has been in (a) violin, where it took me about six months of regular scale practice to conquer the octaves that I've avoided since high school, (b) running, where I went from what I thought was a genetically limited maximum of 3 miles to 13.5 miles, and (c) climbing, where I went from being unable to climb a VB to flashing a V2. All primarily from staying on the grind despite little to no visible progress day to day.
It's been easier to apply this to physical pursuits--easier to believe that the body grows stronger when it's stressed. But for mental (or spiritual) activities, I find it harder to maintain this belief, even though it's held true in the past. It's still really discouraging to study and think and not be able to understand, but I hope that learning to persevere in other areas will help here too.
Quarantine forced me to re-examine (yet again) where my friendships stand, what I expect from them, and how I can contribute to them. The r/askmen subreddit is always inundated with posts about loneliness, which has helped me be more grateful for the strong friendships I developed in high school and college. Looking back, I attribute a lot of our closeness to blogging and sharing our personal writing with one another, for I haven't found a better way of genuinely getting to know people. As I keep saying to myself, I'm going to try and pick up writing more regularly again.
Two resources that I found helpful in initiating reflection were this blog post and this book.
This year, I set up a bunch of recurring 1:1 video calls, which has helped not only to stay in touch more regularly, but also as a form of mutual commitment. It's been helpful to avoid overthinking, e.g. about how long it's been since someone has reached out, if they're still interested in keeping up, if the friendship is imbalanced, etc. It's also been helpful to avoid the hassle of trying to schedule one-off calls when both parties are slow to respond (oops).
There were some more "project-based" calls, i.e. focused on some kind of activity. Primarily video games, like Rocket League with Benny/Jeremy/Alan or Divinity: Original Sin with Kenneth. But also a book club with Mel/Evelyn/Jeff/Anna/Ji-Won, an OS with Aaron/Attilus, a textbook with Justin, and house church. I've found the accountability and company to be super helpful for staying engaged in longer-term endeavors.
Overall, I have a much stronger support system and healther friendships now than in undergrad, where I selfishly and unconsciously neglected a lot of them. But I still worry that I'm not doing enough now, and that catching up biweekly or monthly is too mechanical to really care for people.
In a more technical analogy, I kind of think about poll vs. push architectures,
or kernel vs. user-space threading. In the former, we take responsibility
for periodically checking for interesting events (typically I/O like receiving
a TCP packet or keyboard input via stdin). The problem is that we don't know when
to expect these events, and so it can be inefficient to constantly check if nothing
is happening most of the time. Alternative, push architectures emit notifications
when tasks are complete, so we can efficiently respond only and exactly when
events occur.
In terms of friendships, I guess we should check in as frequently as possible to maintain the relationship, but due to time constraints it's impossible to poll and catch everything important, with possibly the exception of a significant other. So we also have to rely on our friends reaching out to us in the case that something comes up on their end. In that case, maybe regular calls are okay as a baseline polling frequency?
I have some other thoughts on the topic, but this is already a bit long and rambly, so maybe some other post.
I have trouble facing large, ambiguous tasks and tend to cope through avoidance and procrastination, so long-term (or even mid-term) career planning is a struggle. I'm grateful that my manager has really pushed us to talk about and consider what our goals are and how we can be growing, or else I think I would just float along.
In general, I've been working on confronting my paralysis around these kinds of things, which I associate with being an "adult". Anything bureaucratic--registering to vote, updating my driver's license, finding a primary care provider, interacting with literally anyone via phone--historically, I would put off indefinitely. And inevitably I find that it's not a big deal once I start looking into it, that the constant background stress the whole time I'm procrastinating is actually far, far worse.
Hoping that building more experience with these will help overcome my anxiety. Particularly with graduate school applications coming up next fall.