Weekly Blog 7 - Oh hello

I am back! After a month-long leave, a crazy two weeks back at work, and an intense two weeks away in training - I am finally back to regular life and an eight-to-five job at GMT+8. With full access to my arts and crafts supplies, t-shirt and shorts weather, and no airport in sight anytime soon. A relief, not gonna lie. It’s hard to believe what a travel junkie I used to be, with this creature of comfort and habit that I am now.

The jet lag is basically over, after almost a week, so I have no more excuse. The current agenda is to pick up where I left off in terms of routines and projects, and to make room for some new ideas. Aside from feverishly catching up with work, the first thing that I put back in place was my exercise routine, starting off with some yoga classes. I am really stiff. I’m also going to resubscribe to the running app to start running again, hopefully next week.

Everything else is a bit slow, but I am being hard on myself. For fun during the week I repaired a holey cloth bag by hand-stitching patches on it, and that has been quite soothing to work on in the evenings when I get overwhelmed with the amount of stuff to do and the lack of energy to actually do them. This morning I worked a bit on the balcony gardens, with the intention of getting them back up and running for the next months when the angle of the sun is still good.

I need to clean up the kitchen in order to cook more, dust off the guitar and start practising before I can go back to my classes, and make friends with my study so that I can create again. Silence my inner critic so that I can finish this blog post, and move on to other things. Little by little, step by step.

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And then there are the ideas.

During my leave I was relaxed enough to pick up my sketch book and start drawing again. From there I came up with a little equation that I want myself to remember, every time I draw:

Drawing = composition + patience + no expectations of a good outcome

I realised that previously I was focusing too much on the composition (the concept or idea of what the image would be), but was never able to see anything through because I was too impatient to get to the end (hence rushed, uninspired strokes). Because I was always disappointed by the outcome (rushed and uninspired), I was repeatedly frustrated by the experience.

I attribute that to the pressure of time, which increases the stakes of getting things right quickly. It was really not conducive for drawing since my inner bitch kept yelling at myself whenever I created anything that wasn’t awesome, because ugly drawings were equated to a waste of time. But now, if I am able to remind myself to work through the ugly stage, and be ok with the outcome however it is, I might be able to draw more, and as a result, draw better.

This might keep me out of my drawing block (and indeed, I had been drawing a fair bit in Buenos Aires and in Milan), but I will need to allocate time to do it, maybe a morning in the park, or an afternoon in a cafe, with a sketchbook, some pencils, and my own good company. The point is not to make beautiful drawings, but just to draw. From there reestablish the connections between my eyes, my hand, and the world around me.

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Another seed that is growing in the jungle that is my head - I am considering the possibilities of knitting. Now the reason why knitting is pretty much off my radar so far is because I always thought that it was incompatible with the weather that we have. Wool scarves, hats, sweaters - really not tropics-friendly.

But then I met a knitting aficionado during the AI Summer School, who told me that it was possible to knit with linen or cotton yarn, and possible to make small stitches (so that the fabric wouldn’t be too thick). My interest is piqued. I’m still letting it steep for the time being, because I really don’t have much capacity to start anything new in the next couple of weeks, but already I am looking at tutorials and YouTube videos, imagining potential projects…

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Yeah so homecoming has been relatively alright, I’m glad to be back, and I want to quickly get back into the groove and start doing awesome things again. This is sometimes complicated by the fact that there’s another part of me who really doesn’t want to do anything at all, especially after the work day. No cleaning, no planning, nothing. Maybe watch Friends and eat chips all night, how about that?

We’ll talk and figure it out. Meanwhile, a note here about the worldwide IT chaos that I’ve been following with fascination - how amazing is it that we can have one point of failure for so much of our critical infrastructure globally? Airports, hospitals, banks. It wasn’t even a cyberattack, just a bug. Y2K two decades too late. What a crazy world we live in.