Love of Lights

I am sat in the dark of my room at 7 AM, on New Year's Eve's Eve, listening to renditions of Auld Lang Syne on YouTube. New Year's is my favourite holiday of the year, above Christmas and all the others, because it actually symbolises something for me. I mean, naturally the flipping of man-made calenders doesn't literally represent some important change in the fabric of the universe, but it represents an important change in our man-made universe, which is just as, if not more, important. It's an unusual time of ubiquitous introspection, amongst even those who aren't usually into that sort of thing. People think about how their year went and what they will do to better themselves in the next year. People often take it trivially, but still, it's better than nothing, and I find it important. So, having said that, here's my New Year's moment of self-reflection and forward-looking: 2012 was certainly a dynamic year for me, but it was pretty terrible emo...

My generation puts a lot of value in spontaneity: spontaneity of action (fun people!) and spontaneity of thought (witty people). While attractive, I don't think this is necessarily a particularly good characteristic to have -- in fact, the opposite, I submit, is better. Prescience and the sharpening of your rational instrumentality, knowing your end and how to go about achieving it (prescience of action), knowing what things constitute appropriate and interesting conversation and then saying those things (prescience of thought), bear more fruit, I think, than spontaneity. With that in mind, I wanted to write a post about my first semester, so I know what to say before people ask me about it. Socially, it was curious -- interesting, teaching. The most important lesson I learnt from it, I think, was not to put too much emphasis on expectations, especially if they are informed by a mass expectation, which is often itself informed unreliably. Instead, I learnt, have experiences in ...

Today was my last afternoon in Edinburgh for the year 2012. The next time I return it will be 2013 and I will be ready to do things differently. I'm not entirely sure how things will pan out, but with my new equilibrium schedule as a basis, I hope to see a brighter future for myself, in terms of me doing the things I want to do and not falling to apathy, ambition-lack, and self-pity. I took the afternoon to take a stroll about some parts of the city, have some lunch at a café (while reading the very entertaining essay E Unibus Pluram by DFW). It was all spent alone, but I was content. At some point I almost feared that one can live a content life mostly alone (not completely, mind you -- simply mostly). What a dissonant image to my friend- and love-centred mind. Anyway, I took a few pictures, which marks a return of the Roaming Sessions, ed. 6.

I've decided that I want to test run my schedule of equilibrium before next semester, but I can't do it right now because exam season has my mind too frazzled, and holidays are meant to be for relaxing, so I can't have as much weight on Study and Disciplined Creativity as I will during term time. With this in mind, for the holidays (December 17 - January 14), my schedule of equilibrium will run: Unbridled Free Time (including sleep) - 20 hours Study - 2 hours Disciplined Creativity - 2 hours This gives me a ludicrous amount of freedom to do what I want whenever, including sleep longer, but also tests the structure of the schedule out, and also gets me to keep on top of studying and creativity. Saturdays and Sundays remain reserved for completely unbridled free time even in this holiday version.

There are 24 hours in a day. Let's remove 7 for sleep. 17 remain. Let's account 30% of the remaining day for procrastination/unbridled free time -- that's roughly 5 hours. 12 hours remain. Now split the remainder of the day in half, 50% study, 50% disciplined creativity. So the day is split into 4 categories with a certain amount of allocated hours, those being: Sleep - 7 hours Disciplined Creativity - 6 hours Study - 6 hours Unbridled Free Time - 5 hours Now, let's discuss in more detail what each category entails. Sleep, naturally, is for sleep. There needn't be more discussion about that. Disciplined Creativity will include creative pursuits that are too often and too easily procrastinated against, the creative pursuits that require slightly more discipline. They require more motivation than what would fall in 'Unbridled Free Time', but aren't made mandatory by any outside body as in 'Study'. Things include: mainly, reading for myse...

Ideals exist to strive towards. Like glowing beacons in the dark, they guide you towards some better destination. You need not ever reach or attain perfectly an ideal, attempting to do so misses the point. You simply use an ideal to guide your behaviour. There is danger in ideals -- namely, if the ideal is corrupt, bad, or imperfect, you will be lead towards corruption, badness, and imperfection. So you have to remain vigilant and be prudent in your choice of ideals. I've been thinking (well, I'm always thinking) about what my ideal self would be like. What person do I want to be? I want to be a writer, so there are 3 things that I can think of that are important character traits to have as a writer: one should be engaged in the world and with other people, one should read ferociously, and one should write. Today I'm mostly concerned with reading. I don't read as much as I should do, especially considering that my course is text-heavy. But even beyond that, I don...

Before the train of thought slips my mind, I thought I'd make a quick post about it. Recently a few thoughts have been permeating my mind, some inspired by Paul Graham's essays, some by my general anxiety and fear that I'm not interesting because I don't have any particular interests, that I'm not as smart as I'd like to be because I can't find anything particular to be interested in. One of the aforementioned Paul Graham essays is called 'Copy What You Like' which in a way answers my fears and worries about not being interesting, not knowing what I'm interested in. I simply need to mentally trace the things I enjoy down to their core principles, schools of thought, and subject matters and then chase those. I'm currently in my first year of university in the UK, so I've unfortunately already specialised in the fields of Philosophy and Italian (language and culture), but it's no massive problem because I think I've chosen correct...