Furthermore

Wrapping up the Mid-Life Crisis Blogging part 1

As my regular reader will know, I've been blogging occasionally about where I'm going with my life at the moment, and I think I'm now at the stage where I can summarise some of what I've done.

I'm planning to do this in three parts: one on the "big stuff" - what I think I've learned, mission statements, all that kind of thing. One on what I see as the difficulties I face, and this one, which is the easiest, on what has actually changed so far as a result of my recent navel-gazing and introspection. There may be occasional follow-ups, but hopefully this will get it out of my system.

So what has changed for me? The main one is that I've decided I have to have a bit more fun. I'm kind of rubbish at having fun - I'm always telling myself that I've got to do this or that thing. So now I have to officially relax a bit, and enjoy being married and having children.

Update: on re-reading, this struck me as very much a reaction to losing my job back in 2003, and then having various further upheavals during the following year: I think I started acting like "I can't mess about or more bad things will happen". Of course, life doesn't work that way, but it's easy for me at least to think that if only I can be good, then I won't be punished.

That said, I do actually enjoy doing things. It's partly just that I had lost sight of what I wanted to do for myself, so I've been picking up various things to try out. What's currently sticking is:

• meditation - I learned to meditate with the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order at college. I had an excellent teacher, a chap called Ratnaprabha, who ran sessions in Kings College. I've done it on and off since then, but I'm now trying to sit at least twice a week, even if it's only for 15-20 minutes.
• activism - of a gentle and middle class kind. I've started going to the Cambridge Amnesty group, and I'm now membership secretary and deputy web-wrangler. Last weekend I finally did a bit of leafletting for No2id, having done little since I helped set up the group around the end of 2004. I'm also gradually trying to do some small tasks for MySociety, but I've not got so far with that yet.
• web-wrangling - I've been meaning to learn more about this for a while and I eventually realised that one thing that was inhibiting me was the fact that I didn't want to screw up the Furthermore site. But domains are cheap now, so I just bought another, and I shall be fiddling about with it real soon now.
• running - admittedly I didn't stop out of choice, but I'm trying to gradually build back up now to a point where I can do the marathon next year.

The main things I haven't got anywhere with are to do some drawing, and language learning - I'm torn between going back to Japanese, and trying to improve my lamentable French, since Mrs F will be doing it too soon enough, and it'll probably be more use to me. I still don't really feel I have enough time for either at the moment, but they're there on the someday/maybe list at least.

And on re-reading that, it sounds like I've learnt nothing - just bound myself up with a whole load more commitments. Not so though, or I don't think so. I'm only committing myself to things I really want to do, or believe I want to do. I'm not doing things because I feel I ought to.

Tune in next time for the deep stuff, if I can bring myself to post it.

Posted by MFreestone at July 25, 2006 09:41 PM