Excursions

At the start of every year, I read posts from people where they set goals for themselves. I love the theme, but setting goals or resolutions doesn’t work well. I am not a stickler for goal tracking.

Recently, I read a couple of posts where people put out a list of their hopes for the year. Latest from mei. This inspired me to pen one for myself. I thought I might struggle to create such a list when I started writing this. It was surprisingly simple when I put them in buckets - self, health, relationships and interests. So, here we go!

1. Write more than I did in 2023 - target 365 posts
2. Read one book in a month - target 12 books
3. Publish one short story
4. Find a medium that helps me be social on the web
5. Find a place for music in my life again
6. Make a journal entry at least once a week
7. Keep stories on my website updated with one new photo every week
8. Go on a date with my wife once a month
9. Go on a play date with my daughter once a month
10. Family dinner with my wife and daughter once a month
11. Take one picture of my daughter and one of me & my wife every week
12. Meet my two friends circle once a month
13. Inspire interest in Curious Bee to create again
14. Find and connect with people whose ideas resonate with me
15. Improve physical fitness by walking 5 days a week
16. Improve mental fitness by meditating 5 days a week
17. Do Pranayama and Surya Namaskar at least 2 times a week
18. Take care of my face
19. Achieve better work-life balance, minimize life during work
20. Learn to cook roti
21. Visit a cafe alone once a month
22. Speak up my mind, even if it disappoints others
23. Learn to use the calendar to structure day and week
24. Learn to use my smartphone better for reading and writing

I accept it’s slightly late to publish such a list. But I have already been working on a few of these. Plus, it’s better late than never.

Friday evening began promising and then just fizzled out. I had planned many tasks but couldn’t get through to the majority. One big reason is that I am shit tired. My time at work is hectic. Worse, it is chaotic. So, each day leaves me mentally exhausted. Today was no different.

Not that I work long hours. Just the daily grind of finding clarity amidst the chaos, finding the right answers and the way forward sips the energy and drive from the non-office hours. Friday’s are worse because there’s the unspoken promise of recuperating through the imminent weekend. So, I simply give up on all the plans and sway along with my wandering mind.

Today was no different, as I signed the day off. With the hope that tomorrow, I regain the drive and cover for the time I lost.

I watched three movies over the weekend. I don’t usually do this, but after a hectic week at work, I had to give myself some relief. Two of the three movies were absolutely (and surprisingly) brilliant. Another one was just a mindless filler.

The first was 12th Fail. Such an inspiring story told in a simple, no-nonsense manner. In today’s phase of over-produced, over-dramatic, loud action movies, the plain narration was a treat. There was no ear-splitting background music and no unnecessary slow-motion effects. The life the movie was based on already had enough drama that it didn’t need any additional masala. Plus the music from Shantanu Moitra was mesmerising, especially the track Bolo Na that plays in the film. A beautiful, uplifting movie that can be watched with family, something that’s rare these days!

Next, we watched Migration – an unplanned rush to the theatre with the only intention to spend quality family time. And we did. A light, colourful movie with moments of hearty laughs. Of course, with a bucket of popcorn and coke. I always feel refreshed when my daughter has a wonderful time in a movie theatre. Watching her guffaw at the silliest of the jokes brings a big smile to my face. Today was no different.

With this much of the weekend spent on entertainment, I still had time for myself, for writing and lots of reading. I must be doing something right. I have a theory, but I am not ready to share it yet.

The last few days have been extremely hectic at the office for me. I want to get hold of things, but there just are too many threads to look after. I need some system of sorts – I know prioritizing and time-bounding the tasks has helped me in the past. Plus I have come across so many useful systems for getting more done.

But I, of course, still need a system that works for me. I am starting small – stitch a list of tasks, merge a few to shorten it, and finally get them lined up to be ticked off. My only concern at this point is I am adding a lot more tasks to the list than I am getting off of it.

My hope was things would settle down in a couple of days. I am afraid it’s not going to correct on its own. Tells me something is inherently wrong with how I am managing stuff.

Back from a week-long vacation, the first thought I had when I logged into my system after a couple of days rest was I must have missed so much. I wasn’t wrong, of course. My feed reader and timelines were full of unread posts. I did what any sane mind should do - I marked all items as read and started fresh.

It’s very unlike me. I tend to skim through the list and keep things to catch up on later and discard everything else. I simply discarded everything this time. I have learned from the past. I rarely catch up. The list stares back at me the psychological pressure rising with each day until I eventually mark everything as read.

I pre-empted that this time.

One entry missing from the list to handle this time was my email inbox. Surprisingly, HEY has that covered brilliantly. Nothing that’s not of interest reaches my inbox anymore. After a period of indecision on the utility of HEY, I am hooked to the service now that it has solved my email problem.

Every friendship day, me and my family spend time with our friends. Meet them to relive old memories. Individually. This year, I decided to spend the whole day with two of my closest friends – my wife and daughter. We visited a children’s museum and had a blast playing and having fun together.

We had a service person visit us today – the plan was he would take some measurements & quote the price for the service. I’ve never met a service person as techie as this guy. Laser-based measuring tools. An iPad Pro for drawings, taking notes & quotations. Of course, with a Pencil.

Impression was made. The objective was achieved.

After almost a month of chaos, I sit at my desk on an evening with nothing eating up my brain. Nothing too urgent. Or Demanding. I like this sense of calmness, this feeling of being idle. It’s this hollowness, the lack of thoughts, that birth the words in me.

Otherwise, I am busy drowning those thoughts in guilty pleasures. Scrolling meaninglessly. Reading, but not really reading. Binging on YouTube videos. I do that with the hope of feeling relaxed. Instead, all it leaves me is feeling futile.

Every time I find a book enjoyable to listen to, the number of steps I walk increases. Or the time I do house chores for. I love putting the headphones on and listening to the story progress. My current listen, The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, narrated by Derek Jacobi, is one such book. With a good intriguing plot and wonderfully involved narration, I am having so much fun listening.

As a result, I am walking a lot more and keeping my home absolutely clean. A welcome side-effect.

Often my daughter asks me the meaning of a word unknown to her. Which is fine, but she doesn’t stop at that. She wants me to enact the meaning too. Like today she wanted me to enact what a character “squealing” would sound like. Unfortunately, I’m neither that good at English nor at acting. Sigh!

I just got an external display in my workspace at home. I should have done this earlier, but I was afraid the large display will crowd the desk. On the contrary, I love this setup! It has instead freed up with so much space. Curious how something larger can occupy lesser.

My daughter just shushed me because I talked to her while she was engrossed in her adventure novel. Now even I want to read the book.

I love taking portrait shots of my daughter. Her expressions are the focus, and everything blurs away in the background. Anyway, what matters to me is my daughter’s smile or the lack of any. Each expression more priceless.

I hope to live my life in the same manner, in portrait mode. Put things that matter to me in focus. Blur the sidelines into the background. It might be messy around me. It always is. But to let it impact my perspective towards the moment or not is my choice.

So a friendly reminder for myself - put what matters in focus. Make the ugliness that surrounds me the blurred background. It may only heighten the charm of the moment.

And as with photography, not all perspectives can be portraits. But some certainly should.

For the last few days, I have been away from all the social timelines. No specific reason, just that life happened.

I love the visits to the library with my daughter. She loves spending time amidst the books – strolling through aisles, looking excitedly at the varied genres of books. Of course, she hasn’t read them all (duh!), but making her choose her book for the day is a difficult task.

According to a source, these questions “cover the full spectrum of human experience”. I don’t care if they do. I answer.

1. Best sandwich? Cheese Grilled
2. What’s one thing you own that you really should throw out? Boxes that old gadgets came packaged in.
3. What is the scariest animal? Spider
4. Apples or oranges? Oranges, any day. But I can’t get them every day.
5. Have you ever asked someone for their autograph? Yes. Brett Lee the famous Australian Cricketer. Indian players are hard to walk up to. I also want an autograph from many who make me feel starstruck.
6. What do you think happens when we die? Somewhere, a new chapter begins again.
7. Favorite action movie? The Bourne Identity
8. Favorite smell? Earthy smell after a fresh summer rain.
9. Least favourite smell? Spoiled eggs.
10. Exercise: worth it? Absolutely. But I don’t regularly.
11. Flat or sparkling? What’s sparkling?
12. Most used app on your phone? Photos
13. You get one song to listen to for the rest of your life: what is it? Abhi Mujh Me Kahin by Sonu Nigam
14. What number am I thinking of? 14 (this question I am answering)
15. Describe the rest of your life in 5 words. Aren’t those too many words?

(h/t Pete Moore)

Almost every morning, I get a notification from Day One reminding me of an entry I had made on this day in some previous year. It always brings a smile to my face. Most entries are from some 8-10 years back when my daughter was growing up. I am so pleased with myself that I have made these entries. I relive the charm and the excitement of spending time with a growing child.

There are no notifications that I look forward to more than the ones from Day One. This is a worthy investment, both the subscription cost and the cost in terms of time to note the entries. The words I might have found meaningless then read like a heartfelt memory today.

Excitement. Anticipation. Nervousness. A new job triggers all these within me, even after 15 years of knowing what it entails. Yesterday was one such day. I am looking forward to the next few days, months of a lot of expected and unexpected newness. A new role. A new phase.

With many avenues of tracking and improving my well-being already around me, I have decided to make the best use of them. I know I am not good at maintaining a healthy routine for any meaningful duration. Yet, I want to give myself another chance to succeed at forming one by constant nudges and tickles.

A reference to Whole Life Challenge (h/t Halsted Bernard) with its pointed question “What is healthy to you?” front and centre came in handy. The tagline, “don’t try to fit health and wellness into your life. Fit your life into the context of health and wellness” resonated with me. I always had the tools that allow me to track my progress towards a healthy lifestyle; with the recommendations from this challenge, I know what I need to track. I am not undertaking any challenge, but I am going to follow along.

So, I am tracking the seven habits – nutrition, hydrate, exercise, mobilise, sleep, well-being and reflect. With health apps from Samsung and Google, I make note of everything I eat, being cognisant of my diet. I don’t want to cut down on anything yet, but just understand what goes in. Keeping myself hydrated is not a problem I face, I drink enough water regularly.

Though I already do the running and stretching pretty regularly, I am now consciously walking while carrying out the daily chores instead of riding my motor scooter. Though I can’t sleep with a watch on, I now manually enter my hours of sleep. Sure, I miss out on the detailed reports of my sleep pattern, but this is better than nothing. With the bedtime mode scheduled on my smartphone, the screen goes greyscale, reminding me to rid myself of the clingy device. It helps!

Building a habit for well-being has been difficult for me. Meditation, the only well-being activity that I know of, never stuck. I can meditate, but I don’t do this with the right spirit. A constant thought of “am I doing this right” keeps pestering me throughout, and I know I’m not doing it right. Well, who knew there are other well-being practises too – picking up a book, reaching out to a friend or organising a disheveled space. Ah, now that I can do. And do well.

All said, these are early days. I am just a week into tracking these habits and I have already missed out on a couple each day. (I am using a wonderfully simple app, Loop Habit Tracker, to track these). But I am allowing myself the leniency.

This post was sent as an introduction for this week’s issue of my weekly newsletter. I have realized the updates I begin my newsletter with every week get lost once it is out. So I intend to publish these as individual posts also.

I have been pretty happy with Galaxy S22 that I recently purchased, and yet, I find it surprising that my friend’s circle chose it over iPhones everytime to click pictures. This choice is driven by Samsung’s preference to make the pictures look better, clearer over Apple’s to make them look close to real. People who understand photography will always prefer the latter, the most of the mainstream will prefer the former. No surprise, some unknown Android devices keep winning the blind smartphone camera challenges that tech reviewers carry out, like one Marques Brownlee does.

A tangential thought, what do you call the folks that are not experts? The non-reviewers. The enthusiasts. Or the nerds? These are the folks that form the majority market, ones that most companies target. I always struggle to find a term that isn’t derogatory to either side. I at times call them common folks, but it doesn’t sound right to me. Neither does “normal” — that makes the tech enthusiasts, the group I belong to, non-normal? Again, doesn’t sound right. I recently heard someone call this section “muggles”. Yuck! Have people even read the books?

Anyway, back to my device selection. I have been part of the Apple ecosystem for a long time. When I recently switched to Android with a OnePlus device, I was worried that I may miss the benefits of the ecosystem. Well, I did. But not enough to make me go back to the Apple devices. With a Galaxy smartphone now, I had a chance to get back to an ecosystem of sorts again. Samsung has over the years build a viable alternative for each Apple device. A shameless copy initially, now all of them have an identity of their own. One such device is Galaxy Watch 4 which is different from Apple Watch, yet equally powerful when paired with a Galaxy smartphone. For the past week, I have been enjoying how both these devices work together. Samsung’s strategy looks to be working.

This post was sent as an introduction for this week’s issue of my weekly newsletter. I have realized the updates I begin my newsletter with every week get lost once it is out. So I intend to publish these as individual posts also.

This week saw the schools and offices welcoming the students and employees in-person, and I realised I have entered the post-lockdown phase of the pandemic now. For a body and mind that has gotten used to the sluggish at-home routine, the rush-filled days are exhausting. I haven’t gotten used to this routine yet.

It isn’t as if I am working more. Rather, I must be working a lot less than what I was when I could focus more at home. For the majority of the times, that is. But the mere fact that I am at the office floors surrounded by the buzzing coworker space makes the stay tiring. I can see the same behaviour in my daughter. She was extremely pumped to join the school, and still is. However, even she is drained once she arrives home from the school. Well, her reason might be different – surrounded by friends new and old, she is bursting with energy. She has missed her classrooms. And the busy routine. There’s satisfaction on her tired face.

Is it all bad for me? Well, to be frank, not at all. I have enjoyed the company of coworkers in the last week. The way we work when we can interact face-to-face is very different from when it is all virtual. We take many decisions without planning and booking a time on the calendar; as a result, we close more discussions. The virtual mode of working restrained us through the need to over-plan. Over-schedule. It’s surprising how free I felt when I could simply walk to a person and talk.

Sure, the away-from-home routine has impacted my reading and writing habits, too. Well, to be frank, those habits are impacted for quite some time now. I need to get back, find a window to think in this hectic, unsteady life. It’s not new to me, but it’s funny how a couple of years at home has made me forget the office lifestyle. What was the work-life balance that we talked so much about, again?

Well, that’s a thought to ponder over some other time.

This post was sent as an introduction for this week’s issue of my weekly newsletter. I have realized the updates I begin my newsletter with every week get lost once it is out. So I intend to publish these as individual posts also.

My daughter has reached an age now where she lip syncs to songs, mostly pop, in front of the mirror. Of course, using the comb as a mic. Sigh! It’s going to be tricky to keep up.

I have been very keen on listening to Audiobooks recently. The moment I have some spare time, I am listening to the audiobooks. That does not bode well for my other interests. I also blame the brilliant collection of books I have been recommended🙃.

Whenever I wake my daughter up in the morning (thankfully, I don’t have to do it every day), she has this habit of pushing her face further deep into her pillow and just raising her one finger. It conveys just one more minute, Dad! It’s so adorable, and freshens me up every time she does that. And I play along as a dutiful father.

It doesn’t matter for how long she has been in the bed. She may have slept a good 10 hours of good night’s sleep, she still has her finger up when I go and wake her up. It is the sleep that she gets in the extra minute that’s dear to her.

We love this little game of ours. When I knowingly wake her up early, and she knowingly raises her finger up. When that minute is up, I act tough and pull her out of the bed. She knows I am acting. I know she knows. Both of us wear a smug smile on our faces.

Love is knowing your partner better than you know yourself! It was only yesterday when I quipped that am like Po. And I had this gift waiting for me.