The rain has stopped, the clouds have drifted away, and the weather is clear again.
If your heart is pure, then all things in your world are pure. Abandon this fleeting world, abandon yourself, then the moon and flowers will guide you along the Way.
~ Ryokan
Well, my plan to write daily during the past week didn't really work at all! I thought I would be able to leverage all that free time and pick up some of the blogging slack I've been introducing recently. But I always got to the hotel so tired that I didn't really ever do anything. Most days I would just lie on my hotel bed, reading or curled into a ball playing on my Switch rather than go out. My company pays for my meals when I'm out traveling, but I didn't even have the motivation to go and get something to eat for dinner. I did go out one day to visit a bookstore (got a Ryokan poetry book1 for myself and a storybook for my kids) as well as get some small souvenirs for my family.
The thing I was traveling to was a sort of internal conference, and while I do think getting to see teammates in person and meet new folks working on similar areas is great, it is also terribly exhausting. Maybe that's not how it is for everyone, but I've never been one who thrives in social scenarios.
I'm not complaining though :P the trip itself was really nice. I'm always shocked whenever I go to the main company campus in the US and see just how many extremely talented people work there. It doesn't help my impostor syndrome though 😅 but still it's fun, and I really enjoyed all the brainstorming discussions I had even though they were tiring. I even got to see some snow, which is uncommon for me as I live in a tropical country; here's a pic of it from one of the office windows.
From what I understand, snow there is not that common. I heard local folks saying that maybe they get snow twice a year or so, and never in March. I guess I'm lucky then? It was also a really nice, picturesque, almost fairytale-like snow sprinkling, as it wasn't really all that cold outside, with little wind, and while it did snow for a long while (almost a whole day), the snow didn't stick. This meant there was little "sludge" on the streets, and it was warm enough to be outside and enjoy without being bothered about temperature or wind.
I kept thinking my kids would've enjoyed being there with me, but alas, not possible.
Now I'm back home. Actually, today is my first day back. I tried writing from the airport yesterday, but my brain was just toasted after waking up at 3 a.m. to catch my flight. I did write a draft about remote work and reflected on some ideas to make it feel less lonely, but it ended up being quite a convoluted mess, so I'm writing this new one today :P I might clean up the first draft a bit and publish it at some later point, as it was too chaotic even to be passed off as a word vomit. I think the main issue was not that ideas were splattered all over, but that it tried to sound sensible, which to me is a clear sign that something is not sensible to begin with. I know in these word vomits the whole idea is not to have any set standard, but that draft felt like I was wholly going against the grain of the process.
Anyway. During the trip I finished reading The Strength of the Few and, to my dismay, discovered that book three of the series hasn't come out yet! This second book was really good, and it definitely ended on a "great" cliffhanger. I was then left with that all-too-common gap for readers when you're suddenly done with a great page-turner and don't know what to do next. I thought about follow-up books for a while, and even though I've not fully decided yet, I think I'll next be finishing my read-through of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" books. A year or so ago I was around midway through reading "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" (book four), so I'll just start from where I left, maybe backtrack a couple of chapters to jog my memory a bit. Then I have books five and six as well; that should keep me busy for a couple of months at least.
I really enjoy reading Douglas Adams. It's hard to pinpoint it, but the humor is sometimes way too on the nose, and one could say it even feels forced, but I don't know why, it just works for me (and seemingly works for lots of other people). He frequently goes on absurd asides or comparisons that just elevate the whole story and, more than anything, keep reminding you not to take stuff so seriously. This process, I think, allows him to interject some excellent insights on human nature and society as a whole. For example (see full quote here):
“It seemed to me", said Wonko the Sane, "that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane".
~ Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
For me this really works; it scratches an itch that I didn't know I had. Most people would just gloss over the fact that toothpick boxes have detailed instructions on them (I know I have; didn't really pay the fact much attention till now).
We're often too preoccupied with ourselves ("so far lost in our heads," as Adams puts it) to even notice the absurdity of the things around us. Writers like Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Kurt Vonnegut, etc., do an excellent job of reminding us, "hey, stop worrying about yourself for a second and see how absurd it all really is". In some ways it's an excellent reminder to pause, look, and realize we don't need to take everything all so seriously.
Footnotes
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Which is where today's quote comes from! Expect to see more Ryokan poems in the following posts :P ↩