Happiness

Today's Haiku:

Only three patients.

A small list is a blessing

Rounds are fun when short

Bullet Journaling

I have been trying to improve my mental health.  I am sure that if you examine your own life, or relationships, or what you know of some of your close friends, family or associates, you would find that mental illness is all around us, or sometimes within.  I believe it deserves more attention.

In the effort to help regulate my own emotional state I feel that it is important to work on priorities and tasks and planning.  After all, if I know what I need to do (tasks), and why I am doing it (priorities) and when I need to do it (planning), then I can hope to manage events and circumstances that might impact my emotions, for good or bad.  Missing deadlines = bad emotions, getting stuff done on time for the right reasons = good emotions.  This is a little like eudaimonism, "a moral philosophy that defines right action as that which leads to the 'well-being' of the individual."1 (a quote I ran across as a quote in The Bullet Journal Method.)

For a long time when I was a lot younger I was a hot and cold devotee of the Franklin planner system.  But it always fell by the wayside and I can tell you that when I had a year of that ordered, I never, ever used it the entire year.  Never.  It may have worked better if I had stuck with my desk job but I didn't and such a huge system is not really too useful in the white coat and scrubs world of surgery.  Plus, it is really pretty rigid.  Obviously with tabs and blank/ruled paper you can do whatever the heck you want with it but then you could just buy a binder with paper in it for a lot, lot less.

Several years ago I stumbled on something called the bullet journal method and started adapting some of the lighter elements of its philosophy.  Then one day a couple of months ago I went ahead and got the book that covers the system in depth, called The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll.  I am glad I did.  It is extraordinarily flexible (because it is based on a bound notebook of empty, dot-grid paper) and seems more meaningful to me than any system I have tried in the past.  Plus, and this is really important - if I don't use if for a day, no big deal!!!  I don't have to stare at the blank pre-printed pages of the days I skipped and feel bad about spending $40-50/year for paper blanks, of which I might only use 20%. 

Anyway, it is super detailed if you really want to get into the details of it.  I am in fact still in the stage of figuring out which pieces I will go forward with and those I won't.  My next step is to try and re-structure my early morning schedule to do a little planning, a little meditation and praying and a small period of scripture reading.  Part of that would be going over my bullet journal and using a little more of its techniques to structure my life a little better.

What systems have you used and found useful?  Which ones not so much?

1.  https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_eudaimonism.html

A red arc shoots forth
A brazen snip with the Metz
Should not have cut that

Today's Haiku:

Gray ropy tendrils
Suppurative and smelly
Chronic wounds are bad.

So I just told my wife and one of my daughters that I have a blog and they were so surprised.  So I had to prove it to them, which I did by pulling it up and showing them, then I generated this post.  I am amazed to realize I have had this blog for about 10 years!  I suppose it might be more useful if I posted to it a lot more often.

I don't want to be famous or even understood, I just like to write random stuff once in a while.

Things that are going on:

1.  looking for a job
2.  writing - it is NaNoWriMo, but I am so busy
3.  language - I love different languages, have been working on Norwegian for awhile now.  I think I will probably work on it until the end of the year.  Next, I'll go back to Korean.  Korean is stressful and difficult for me.  So I needed a break, so that's why I switched to Norwegian, which is easy by comparison.
4.  Army stuff - I need to do the pre-BOLC online course, but of course I can only initiate it at a .mil network.  Gotta schedule that.
5.  Daughter #2 wants to learn Krav Maga, so we are going to check out a martial arts school this week.  They teach kali arts there, too, so maybe I can pick up my escrima sticks again.
6.  Turned 49 last week, no big deal.  I still think pretty immature thoughts most of the time and at this point in my life have only learned to simply not let all of them come out of my mouth.  I suppose for most values of n, this is as mature as I am going to get.
7.  Looking forward to reading the 4 hour work week, but I am pretty sure it is going to take a lot longer than a week.
8.  Still slogging through Schneider's endovascular text - very readable, pretty up to date (this is the 2019 edition), and Understanding Ultrasound Physics.  My goal is 10 pages a day in each, at least 5 days a weeks. 
9.  My wife got me Air Pods for my birthday.  Best. Birthday. Present. Ever.

All in all most things are going mostly well, so I'll take that.

Tusen Takk!