malvasia bianca

I gave notice at my job this week; nothing against my job, I’ve very much enjoyed my time there, it’s just that I’ve been there fourteen years and it’s time for a change. And I figure that working there fourteen years means that I should probably take some time to reset instead of jumping straight into another job; fortunately, our finances are such that taking a noticeable pause should be fine. (Though it would be nice if our president weren’t actively trying to drive the economy off a cliff…)

Which raises the question of what to spend my time on now that I won’t be working. The ideas that feel right enough to be worth considering are:

1. Spend more time on Nei Gong
2. Spend more time on Tai Chi
3. Do some programming projects
4. Get back to playing musical instruments
5. Read more
6. Chill out

So, some notes about the pros and cons of each of those and where I’m currently ending up.

 

Nei Gong

I’ve spent more and more time doing Nei Gong over the last several years. First doing a bit of standing practice and a bit of sitting practice every day; then, when I switched to working part time, trying to do a couple of hour of Nei Gong on my days off (and also on Sundays); and then increasing the frequency with which I go to in person workshops.

And I am definitely making progress; and I can also see hints of where the next steps would be. But also there’s some basic foundational aspects of Nei Gong practice that I could use stand to improve on, and even if I do shore up my foundations, taking some of those next steps will require a decent amount of work. So spending more time on Nei Gong would make a difference.

Tai Chi

I’m getting better at Tai Chi: I think my external and internal mechanics are pretty good, I think that I’m getting pretty good at doing some of the forms my teacher teaches. But there are several forms where I’m still working on getting the basic external shapes down, and I would benefit from spending time going deeper into those forms where I do feel like I’ve got the basics down solidly.

Also, the head of my Nei Gong school also offers online Tai Chi courses. I’ve started spending a little bit of time on those, and they’re surprisingly interesting, interesting in a way that complements what I’m learning from my main Tai Chi teacher. So I would definitely benefit from spending significant amounts of time on that approach to Tai Chi as well.

Programming Projects

There are a couple of programming ideas that have been bouncing around decently actively in my head over the last two years. Nothing big — we’re not talking about ideas that would lead to found a company, just a small utility app and an idiosyncratic game idea — but ideas that I would like to get out of my head and into reality.

Also, one concern with taking a noticeable break from working is that it would create a gap on my resume. So if I could do something that was keeping me fresh, teaching me new skills (I haven’t done iOS development, and it’s clearly time to start getting used to AI-assisted programming), and producing some concrete products that I can point at, that should help shrink that gap. And heck, maybe I’ll be lucky and one of these ideas will scratch a few other people’s itch too; they’re definitely not going to bring in a lot of money, but even bringing in a little bit of money while I’m not employed would help.

Play Music

In the second half of last decade, I spent a decent amount of time playing guitar. And maybe three years ago, I spent a decent amount of time playing piano; I stopped doing that soon after we got Velvet, though. Both of those felt good for my soul at a fairly fundamental level, I’d like to get back to that.

Read Books

When I was in grad school, I read about a book a day. These days it’s more like a book a week; and without me regularly taking the train to work, that frequency will go down further unless I take more action to stop the decline. Like pretty much everybody else, there are way too many short term micro-distractions pulling at me; reading books would be a good way to counter that.

Chill Out

Like I said above, I’m not quitting my job because there’s anything actively bad for me going on there; but, honestly, I probably am at least somewhat burned out. And probably jumping into a bunch of other projects isn’t the best way for me to recover from that burnout!

Also, my body may or may not allow me to really work hard on all of these areas: some are things that I can do just fine if I’m a little tired, but Nei Gong in particular is hard to do really well when my energy levels are noticeably off. I wrote a year ago that I was making progress on my energy levels, and I think that progress was real, but subsequent experience has made it pretty clear that there’s still something going on with my sleep that affects me noticeably during the day.

I’m actually pretty optimistic that my doctors and I are finally zeroing in on what specifically has been going on over the last year, and a concrete plan for noticeably improving that might well be coming into shape over the next few weeks. So hopefully things will be significantly better by, say, the end of the summer? But I can’t count on that; so any planning that I do has to be realistic, has to take into account that, in the short term, strategic napping will be a good idea, and that there will be days when I have to pick and choose how I spend my energies.

 

Putting It All Together

So, having gone through that, what’s the upshot? The best answer that I’ve come up with is that I’d like to spend time on these three areas:

1. Nei Gong
2. Programming
3. Tai Chi

Those are listed in priority order, and while I’m pretty confident that I’ll be able to spend noticeable amounts of time on the first two, I’m actually not at all sure that increasing the amount of time I spend on the third will make the cut in practice. (Especially given that, as I mentioned above, Chill Out is going to force its way into the list at least to some extent.) But, when push comes to shove, I think I’m at a place in my Nei Gong progress where giving it some extra oomph would really pay off; and I really do want to get those programming ideas out of my head, and I think the pragmatic reasons to spend time on that one are important too. I really would like to spend more time on Tai Chi, so I’m putting it on the list, but in third place with a big gap between second and third; I really would like to get back to a regular music practice routine, but I’m not at all confident that I’ll be able to do that without eating too much into the top two priorities, so it’s going to stay in the aspirational bin of things to maybe work on later once my health gets a little better and/or my priorities change.

 

So that’s the plan; though, of course, who knows how the plan will work out in practice. And if any of my coworkers are reading this: I’ll miss you, please stay in touch!