Weekly Blog 1 - Here comes the sun

— 3 minute read

And I say, it’s alright -

In the last week I have been a bit under the weather. It’s Raya week and I had big plans of finishing my baju kurung during the holiday, but all that went out of the window when my body decided to break down. To be fair, after Raya I’ll be what the Cantonese say - 得閒死唔得閒病 (have time to die but no time to fall sick) - but still I was a little annoyed at my body’s inability to keep it together, squandering the precious days off.

To balance out my wallowing with some positive energy, I went down a rabbit hole in Youtube on a series of videos on purposeful living, which started me off on a path of realisation of how I’ve been blindly slipping and sliding through life day after day. Week after week. Something needs to be done. I have several ideas in mind, and one of them is this.

The resolution

I am going to blog weekly for a period of at least a year. rubs palms together

I remember my blogging stint during the first movement control order of the pandemic. While at times I felt quite uninspired to write I was in general able to churn out regular pieces (of varying quality) for three months, and I now have a window to look back on those weird days of mass standstill.

I figure that a regular practice of writing will be good for me in the writing department, but also in the department of paying attention to life. Instead of staring at my phone (e.g. during my commute) I can have a little notebook to jot down ideas over the week to write about on the weekend. Being more mindful and in touch with the sights and sounds, as well as my inner thoughts.

Showing up weekly to contemplate life, and to contribute to web scrapers scrounging for data to train large language models. (You're welcome, Big Tech.) I heard on Hard Fork (a podcast that I follow) this morning that OpenAI, Google and Meta are running out of internet data to exploit, can you imagine that? They are considering making synthetic data to train the LLMs. And in any case a lot of web content nowadays is generated anyway so by hook or by crook we will get this AI eating AI eating AI eating… situation.

But I digress.

Why one year?

I’ve been trying to have a longer term perspective, with one year as a minimum unit. I forget which podcast it was that gave me the idea that we need to think about health maintenance as a 1000-day plan (e.g. any extreme diet that you cannot sustain for 3 years is out). I believe it was in March 2022 that I started to pivot towards regular exercise, which makes it more than 720 days of consistent effort (injuries and other setbacks notwithstanding). pats self on back

A one-year commitment to blogging will also give me the space to record my adherence to various other routines that I want to put in place, for at least a year. I am still trying to figure this piece out. What are the processes that I should have in place to maintain a healthy lifestyle, and to progress towards a direction that I want to go in the longer term? Where do I want to go in the longer term?

And with this cliff-hanger I end.