I was fortunate enough to be able to participate in a video call last weekend that included much of my increasingly global extended family. Even though I had spoken to everyone within the last few months, largely negating any discomfort, the combination of not having grown up in their vicinity (or even the same country), the consequent countless missed moments in each other’s lives, and the occasional undertone of cultural divides I have only recently realized may not be as alienating as I once assumed, meant that I wasn’t really sure what to expect.

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I started this blog unaware of the range of the topics I would touch on. Within the first week of consistent posts, I have already changed the format a few times to reflect this indecision. However, I knew that over time I would attempt personal topics more often, leaning towards events in my own life that don’t claim relevance to anyone else. I find it inevitable that I explore the freedom of my thoughts uninhibited, particularly as this blog is an exercise in voluntary writing. I also aim to operate it with the expectation of zero readership, so under this assumption I have nothing to lose. In any case, I can’t imagine encumbering myself to avoid the small chance of discomfort or a gaffe is a wise long-term strategy.

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Personal experience

I recently read this book (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion - Jonathan Haidt - 2012) after a long hiatus from reading non-required material, with rare exceptions. As a result, I had little confidence that I could get through it, or any book for that matter. I decided to forge ahead anyway and try the audiobook edition which I had purchased some time ago. Within ten minutes or so, I realized that this book claimed to answer essential questions about morality, ethics, and their implications on modern-day political ideologies that I actually had dying curiosities about. By the end of the book, I realized that I largely got what I was looking for: a framework of thought by which I could empathize with the strengths (I was largely blind to) and articulate the weaknesses (I was too focused on) of political views wildly different than mine. I’m not sure if this will spark long-term shifts in my own views, but I feel I am now better equipped to view those with well-founded divergent views from a starting point of goodwill and inquisitiveness rather than assuming faulty reasoning, misinformation, or stubbornness. I can’t imagine any of us has all of the answers to a system as complex as modern society, so we would all be well-served by talking to those who have different blind spots from ourselves.

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There’s something rather wonderful about rediscovering a friendship with an old friend or family member that you haven’t talked to in a while. It is the fascination of meeting someone new, requiring the unmasking of facets of yourself and the inquiry into theirs, interlaced with the comfort and kinship typically only found in the midst of closer friends, familiar with many of your quirks and interests. It is the amazement of remembering all that you had forgotten you had in common, the scramble to catch up on whatever you can remember happened in the last few months, and also the occasional feeling of disappointment or angst hearing about an event in another’s life that you weren’t there for.

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As part of better understanding what types of music fit my various mental states and moods, I have been trying to find music when reading or writing material that requires a little less cognitive load. For more intense tasks, I generally prefer non-lyrical electronic music or revert to eschewing sounds altogether. However, for medium load tasks that are typically less technical or layered in complexity, the unused load creates a void that seems to lead my thoughts astray over a period of time. Some types of music, physical activity, or other occupations with a limited burden seem to mitigate this effect. Non-lyrical music proves insufficient, but songs in languages I can partially understand prove too distracting, so for the past year or so I’ve settled on music in languages I don’t understand for these settings.

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How does one even begin to prioritize and choose between longer-term undertakings spanning several months or more? Based on the limited experience of my own life, I find it difficult to place much confidence in my careful rationalizations when evaluating several options, particularly when each contributes to distinct buckets or “burners”¹ in one’s life. Not only must I contend with the uncertainty of each option’s outcome, but also the expected ancillaries of each as well as their opportunity costs given present alternatives.

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I finally decided to make the trek out of my apartment today to replenish on groceries after more than a week of quarantining myself, and in the midst of widespread self-quarantining to limit spread of the coronavirus. By the standards of any normal day, it would be relatively uneventful and mundane. However, the combination of a looming possibility of catching the most infamous virus in a generation, the ambiance of a city extraordinarily devoid of faces, and my almost total solitude in preceding days made the most mundane of activities such as disembarking from a bus feel surreal. At first, I found myself even going out of my way to avoid eye contact with other passengers, as if that’s how one gets sick. Once past the hump of remembering how to comport myself in (the light of spattering of) public, I still found myself continually distracted by an effort to maximize my distance from every other individual. My best efforts at social distancing towered over the highest shelves at the supermarket, competing with the warning signs plastered throughout the city to add an undertone of stress and concern I immediately wanted to shrink away from. The sunlight, ostensibly free of viral connotations, served only as a reminder of the impending return to my walled refuge and the bathing in artificial light that would ensue.

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What is pride? I was in a conversation some few weeks ago with a friend in which they claimed to feel pride because of the country they were from, in contrast to many other places which handled the issue in question differently. At the time, this seemed like a normal turn of conversation, as expressing national pride is anything but uncommon. Later on, however, I started to wonder what this actually implied.

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I started this daily notes sub-blog to have a more frictionless way to post daily thoughts without the commitment of composing a full blog post. The #100Days challenge which requires writing and publishing a post every day for a hundred consecutive days seemed like an appropriate endeavor, particularly in this time of self-quarantining due to the coronavirus which necessitates more solitary activities. I’m interested in the implications of obligating oneself to capture a fleeting thought and develop it into a coherent narrative, every single day.

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Note: This isn’t the type of post I expected to write when setting up this blog, but given the extraordinarily long hiatus since my last post and nonexistent readership (most posts are primarily written to help me structure my thoughts), it seems as worthy as any.

Moments devoid of thought are often scarce in a world dominated by notifications and messages from seemingly every direction, but I am regularly impressed by their value. During a recent such standstill, I found myself reflecting on the factors outside of my life that made my life experiences over the last few years as enjoyable and fulfilling as they were.

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