The final three months of 2023

This year, I started doing quarterly annual goals for my personal life instead of yearly ones. I figured this would give me ample time to adjust as necessary based on what is actually happening in my life — unlike goals at the beginning of January, when it’s often a time to dream big. But the reality of life’s ups and downs is most evident at the harvest time of year. There are no fruits from withered shoots.

In practice, having quarterly goals has given me more opportunities to notice trends in how and why I get sidetracked. It always seems like there’s something happening, and as a result of these more frequent check-ins with myself, I recently had the novel thought that maybe I should bracket into my life that I’ll need extra time for illness, death, inconvenience, frustrating life maintenance, and the like. It’s all stuff that just happens, and maybe time management stresses me out so much sometimes because I want to plow through in the same way I usually tackle going uphill: I choose a pace and I stick to it, come hell or high water.

Maybe that is how burnout happens. None of this is, I am guessing, a revelation to anyone except me. A time management revolution is at hand.

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My thoughts about that started in a different place. I wasn’t thinking about getting sidetracked or the incidentals that come up in the course of a life. I was thinking through a problem over the latter part of the summer related to managing my energy and ensuring that I had paced myself to avoid mental fatigue, and I phrased that as a question to myself: What actually puts energy back in rather than taking it out?

And it ultimately landed on this.

For this is the soul’s happiness: to be able to imitate its own god, to the extent of each person’s power, so long as [that person] lives life here [on earth] in an uncorrupted manner. 

Hermias/Syrianus, Hermias: On Plato Phaedrus 245E–257C, trans. Share, Michael, and Dirk Baltzly, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022, 198,30.

For those who have some idea of their leader, maybe part of the solution is to focus on the leader-God as a paradigm and to pick activities and come from a perspective that amplifies that.

So I made a few changes.

First, I have colleagues who meticulously plan in advance when they have research consultations with students. For hours. I decided that I would not force myself to do this anymore. It had always felt really stressful and had buzzed my head with all sorts of noise, like wading through mental molasses, and I rarely use what I prep once I actually start talking to the student. I’m way better off doing everything when students are actually present, when it can be a conversation, and when I can hit flow. That is the style that works for me — as if I’m somehow imitating an oracular mode even if I am in fact operating in a formal academic institution. This does not mean that I’m not planning at all. Since I now know that this is how I work best, I am redirecting my planning efforts to ensuring that I have active learning exercises in my back pocket at all times and that I am diligently up to par with all of the updates on platforms I use regularly. This is easily done when I’m answering questions via email, as I can take more time and have a real case study to work through.

Second, I decided that I was going to sign up for the staff price to attend a string concert series this academic year. I love stringed instruments. (It has been a particularly sore point my entire life that we didn’t have stringed instruments as part of my rural school’s music program, which is how I know how to play the flute instead.) I hadn’t been to a concert in years. The first one I went to, I was intensely worried because it was a weeknight. Didn’t even arrive home until after 10 PM (and I wake up at 5:55 AM). But it made me happy and filled with joy. And I have an entire envelope filled with tickets promising more happiness.

Third, I decided that after those successes, I would just use this as an operating mode for further things that come up. And, interestingly, it prompted me at one point to think about my bad habits. As we all know, reading about how to solve problems and action steps we can take to manage ourselves is never ready for a reader out-of-the-box. You can never exactly copy someone else’s morning or self-care or to-do or any other routine or mitigation strategy. Thinking about this as an operating mode is a new way to prompt myself towards steering my modifications of the advice I’m encountering without a lengthy trial-and-error process.

I also had a small meaning touchpoint when I went to an online discussion and the speaker (someone I know) mentioned all of the people involved in Platonism in antiquity who wrote novels, which made me feel a bit better about how I choose to mentally frolic through fields of fancy. I’m going to say things about this on my Substack eventually (my latest post didn’t go into it) — after What Happened At Black Sands is written and published, when readers encounter the ending. I’m integrating the two novellas I already have out into a fiction-based meditation on something Simplicius said in his commentary on Epictetus. The decision was solidified after attending that discussion, but I’d started thinking in that direction after pondering how to resolve a tension between the endings of The Village of Strong Branches and an unpublished piece I’m still working on called When the Water Rose High because some aspects of those stories are geometrically similar. And then Juniper Vale’s “Want” came on my Spotify Discover Weekly, and the spoken word elements drew me back to Simplicius in v. II 135,30. And I need to revisit a few things from Proclus’ Essay 16 on the Republic. I’m being cryptic on purpose because it’s all in very early stages of sketching out and not worthy of public discussion yet.

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In late August, I took some time off to clean my apartment. It went badly. I had a bad dust mite allergy reaction because I tried cleaning my doors for the first time since Yoyo died, and I also attempted to clean my apartment’s mini blinds, which I am perpetually afraid to touch. I was wearing a mask. I showered immediately after I finished. I thought it would be enough.

I should have been in full PPE.

I ended up (mostly) losing my voice and having a rough allergy-induced sinus infection for a few days. Tested negative for COVID. This renewed my back-burner project to eliminate all open storage except an heirloom piece from my grandfather (and books are easy to dust) and my shrine (which I keep clean anyway). I’d put it off after Yoyo’s death and my cats’ adoption because I had other shorter-term expenses.

There’s something hilarious about this happening when I was cleaning the doors after a few errant months. I’d just finished reading Lykeia’s Before the Doors as part of my project to actually read more written by other Apollon devotees. They weren’t all exterior doors (my apartment has more doors than rooms, which is great for corralling cats). And the comedy helped me cope with what was otherwise a really sad situation. One of the reasons I’m wary of travel is that I’m afraid of staying in relatives’ homes, where there is carpet and plush furniture and probably no dust mite cover over a spare bedroom’s mattress. My home is leather and wood and high-heat-washable throws and as much as possible in drawers or behind glass. And I try to keep what I have to a minimum for a variety of reasons. One, consumerism is killing the planet. Two, solid closed storage is expensive and heavy. Three, I went to a Goodwill Outlet store and saw what happens to the possessions of the dead. People were going through boxes with gloves to keep their hands from getting cut on glass. It was demeaning all around — for the dead haunting (I’m not sensitive, but it was such an intense feeling of unease), for the people rummaging through the giant bins to find any good items by the pound, for the things that would not be sold and that I knew would end up on container ships and end up on other continents in trash piles that endanger humans and wild places. These possessions are all transient. So why waste time caring for things that aren’t numinous or that don’t carry strong connections to those we love?

Right now (yes, this is in progress), I’m replacing a media console with closed storage that can fit both of my printers, and I have new closed storage for some sentimental items. It took me a while to stomach having to spend that much (basically, something good quality enough that I’m unlikely to need to pay a hauler to remove something that has structurally failed), but then I realized that despite this not being covered by my flexible spending account, this is technically a medical expense, and people need to modify their home spaces on their own dime all of the time for worse things than suddenly feeling like they swallowed a fireball and are having someone beat their sinuses with a hammer an hour after daring to dust — as if the negligence of the past few months carried a penalty. When this final phase of dust mite mitigation is complete, it occurs to me that the only spaces that are open will be the bookshelf I use for spiritual study books; my shrine; and my ancestor veneration console. Most else that makes up my life will be invisible except the wall art and the IKEA lamps. And I don’t mind that. Especially not after how off-putting it was to read a Reddit thread in which someone referred to their read books as their “conquests.” Books are guest-friends.

Part of me wants to link the dust mite allergy “it is imperative to be clean at all times” thing to the sense-making process I’ve been going through. Another part of me resists it because allergies are just allergies, and we do what we need to do to manage them, just as we would any other health condition. Still, I’ll have way more time to dust the doors without worrying about things on open surfaces.

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This has all impacted how I’m approaching my Q4 goals. I have interpersonal, health, financial, creative, and spiritual goals.

In my spiritual practice, to remain on-topic for KALLISTI — I need to restart my system for importing tasks connected to the lunar cycle. This has been sporadic since Yoyo’s death despite the fact that I’m now going to full moon yoga. I need to be more assertive about taking self-care breaks at work that ideally involve meditation, going for a walk, or reading (not on a backlit screen). Twice a month, I want to spend one weekend day doing extended prayers (probably on a Sunday, as Saturday mornings are for cleaning). My core daily prayers are already consistent, especially on weekdays when it matters that my routine is on-point. On the weekends, I’d like to do better at praying earlier in the morning instead of sometimes getting carried away by cleaning until I’m hungry. And I need to work on mental noise reduction.

As may be evident from what I have written, all of my goals are in some way in conversation with my spiritual practice. I think that Simplicius’ commentary on Epictetus is very influential for how I am thinking about this overall, although I am definitely also taking things away from the Phaedrus commentary that I mentioned earlier. The tool I use for annual planning asked me to choose words to describe how I want to be this year. I’m thinking quarterly — so I could sum my goals for Q4 as being pious, assertive, flexibly resilient, and consistent. And what that looks like is ensuring that I keep my bearings rather than reacting to the winds of the moment. Or, to put it in a flippant way, what is the best expression of harmony in this little pocket of the Glow-Light Club?