Getting Things Done

( I finished my missions for this week and felt like the exercise worked well, so I've set more for next week )

Despite being quite busy with family-time, I've also spent some time reflecting on where I am in life right now. Looking for jobs helped with that. I don't want to work doing something I don't care about. I don't want to work doing something where what I've been doing for the last few years is irrelevant. I want to teach, and research, and write, and do activism. I've made up a budget and the teaching I'm doing now is enough to support me, if I'm not extravagant. Living on a budget is a constraint, but it's far less of a constraint than working in a job that I don't want to do. I'll try it out for the next couple of months and see how I go and whether I end up eating into my savings. I'm going to keep looking for and applying for jobs and I hope that I'll find something, but I'm not going to work just for the money. In the meantime, I'm going to use the time I have free to get more of my thesis published, to fix people's bicycles, to work on the issues I care about, to write fiction, learn greek, practice ukulele and accordion...

I've also decided this in part because I've been reading Prosperity Without Growth, which has been a good reminder that ultimately we need to work towards a system where people make less money (evening out inequalities and moving towards an income that allows for happiness, but not overconsumption) and spend more time on activities that don't put a burden on the planet.

Up past my bedtime

Staying up late, listening to music, I end up reading and thinking and writing things and then deleting them. Probably thinking too much, trying to untangle myself and pulling the knots tighter. I guess there are some things that you can't think through - you just have to see how life goes.

Anyway, I found myself strangely touched by this, from paperpools:

"A bad year ends. A worse is coming.

One funny thing. When I wrote The Seventh Samurai, to give it its correct title, I imagined that a man might be driven to despair by all the ugliness he had seen and want to see some unprompted dazzling act of goodness. I think this may not have been right. What I find is that if you deal with bad people for long enough you treasure even trifling acts of courtesy. If I go to a café and order an espresso, I'm charmed, disarmed, speechless with gratitude if the waitress brings an espresso."

I am not driven to despair, on the whole, but the same time I understand what it is to be overcome with gratitude for the small and unexpected moments of kindness that friends and strangers sometimes bestow on us.