MCO 2.0 - The Life of Ali

Sunday. Maybe writing once a week is not a bad idea.

I'm glad to report that this week has gone well, some small anxieties notwithstanding. I talked to my friend S yesterday and through the conversation realised that I may have become too attached to my nice little life rhythm. In that, I cling onto the routine of waking up at 5:30am, working consistently, yoga in the afternoon, and so on. Well, unfortunately, things happen. I hurt my knee last week and so yoga crawled to a halt and there was a night when I just couldn't sleep, resulting in a sleep debt cycle in the days after. I gamely stuck to the plan but there were times when I didn't feel it, and the great scary monster of "You Will Fail In Life" poked his head out kindly to say hi. Just to remind me that he's there and he's watching over me.

Time to readjust. Talked to Komeil yesterday and he reminded me that it's more about flexibility, which it totally is. I think I did well by noticing my natural patterns but I now have to work on handling shocks, which I'm unfortunately, naturally not very good at. The reliance on routines has increased in the last year. But it's ok. I can train myself. I can think like a yogi. And by the way, it seems like I can now finally touch the floor in a forward bend, which I'd never been able to do. See? Trained flexibility.

I've been trying to work on Farsi, which took a back seat in the last couple of months that I've been busy with work. I still have a class weekly, and I allocate about an hour of revision before class, but it started weighing on my mind that I wasn't really moving ahead much. With every week's class with Nasrin I got new additions to my Farsi vocabulary, but I couldn't keep track of them. My earlier resolve to do spaced repetition became more space than repetition, and with time my bucket of words dwindled down to a pitiful level.

So yesterday I made a small but brave attempt to make a small illustrated story, to try to own the words, and here it is, in its unedited glory accompanied by translations:

Title: The Life of Ali

This is Ali.
The head of Ali is like a tomato.
Ali has a little cat.
The little cat is a friend of Ali in spite of his tomato head.
This is the power of friendship.

Ali lives in a world of black and white.

Why?
Maybe his god does not know colours.
But everything is good.
Ali is always happy and always dancing.
He is good in spite of not having colours.
Because what are colours, he does not know,
and he has the friendship with the cat.
Everything is good.

Nasrin still has to correct it, but I am pretty happy that I made it. It was a lot of fun and definitely made the learning less dry, and hopefully I'll be able to retain the words better. I'm motivated now to go through again the lessons to harvest more words so that I can make more things up. It's a little bit like having a handful of Lego bricks and wondering about what I can build within my limits.

For example, I have the word "dance" in my word bucket, how do I use it? And so Ali starts dancing in spite of his colourless world.

So during the week I discovered the beauty of online shopping... for live plants! I must say that I was pretty hooked and went a little crazy (mantra: biodiversity is good). So now I am looking forward to some saplings to be delivered (rosesx2, jasmine, passion fruit, hydrangea, lavender) and some more seeds for good measure (marigolds (African, Mexican, pot/calendula), bulk red radish seeds for microgreens, evening primrose, Tiny Tim yellow cherry tomatoes, taylor beans, and chives).

The sun is really taking its time in coming back into the balcony, and I'm charting the angle of light on the wall with anticipation. I'm growing several sun-loving plants and they'll get a real boost when the sun comes in - so yes. We're really looking forward to it.

I guess life in general is good. As long as the wheels of the bicycle keeps turning, balancing is not as difficult (look who's talking - the World's Worst Cyclist). There are different things to work on and many things to be thankful for. We can even thank the passing of time (something that I find difficult), because if time does not pass the sun does not arrive. And I want the sun to arrive.

And just like that, January is over.