Daily writing prompt

Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?

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So good that I answered the reverse writing prompt 10 months ago! Biggest challenge over the next months? Nailed it!

The hard answer is – dealing with uncertainty without dwelling on the endless negative outcomes. I need my imagination to be helpful.

To translate this unnecessarily complicated sentence that contains the word “dwelling” (who uses dwelling?), imagining versions of the future is a tricky beast. We can plan for it, we can dream about it, but we can’t really know what’s going to happen. So I do my best to not picture future versions of myself and to avoid the Fortune Telling Thinking Error but I try to set some personal goals and chase them.

Apart from my fortune telling negative predictions, I set myself a bunch of personal goals about 1 year ago (November to January):

• 10k steps on average for a year (a New Year resolution)
• Use Jetpack Mobile for reading (since November 2022)
• Blog daily (since mid-January)
• Visit Cherni Vrah (from 2022)

I plan to write a summary about these goals in January but I’m quite happy with myself. My goals were not ambitious enough.

Daily writing prompt

Are you more of a night or morning person?

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I used to be a night person. Then I had kids. Then I discovered the saying:

If it’s not important enough to be first thing in the morning, it’s not important enough to be the last thing in the evening.

— Someone said that on the Internet

I’m now a morning person. I still do evening work sessions to catch people in distant timezones but my most productive time is the early morning.

Daily writing prompt

What’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make? Why?

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Looking back, I think the hardest decisions I made were related to giving up certain things, projects, or ideas.

For example, I gave up a series of pet projects I had from my early years of engineering. Some of these were integral part of my self-identification. But we need to recognize what’s important and focus on that, recognize what brings joy and focus on that as well. All of my pet projects needed significant maintenance and moderation and over the years, turned to unpaid chores that drifted away from their original purpose. I only mildly regret about my old blog.

Speaking of pleasurable activities that turn into chores, reading can be one. I can see myself switching from reading to gaming at some point in the future. Or maybe I’ll watch a TV series. Owning books can be that as well. The first batch of books I gave up to the library was particularly hard. I’m glad I did it because books pile up quickly and can clutter any home. There has to be a way for all these books to be rehomed.

There are harder decisions in life but I prefer to think about choices that are not between different evils. Like the following:

Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat
Gotta make my mind up
Which seat can I take?