A tiny human in a massive world
#44 - walking home is underrated
Hi there,
How’s your week been? Relaxed or busy, stressed or chill, thanks for stopping by to read me pondering about the way life is.
My week was calming and leisurely as we drove up to a hill station not too far from home. Stunning pics 🖼️, eye-catching views, soothing cool climate, a picturesque lake and vibrant flowers: I’d say it was worth the 5-hour drive
Highlight of the week: a hearty feast at a non-veg restaurant on the way back from holiday 🍲. Despite gulping down large quantities, I got in some sort of a flow state, devouring without distraction, until there was nothing left…apart from a little bit of rice that I simply couldn’t consume. The experience was memorable enough to make me write a Twitter thread about it for the next hour!
It seems like yesterday It seems like a while ago that I handed in my Additional-Maths paper. Since then, the subject of GCSEs have been both out of sight and out of mind. Now they are rearing their heads again, in the form of results day on August 25 - a mere 11 days away.
I said ‘2 weeks to go!’ to my parents, who both disapproved of my “unnecessary” counting down. Friends have been bringing it up in conversations, asking how I feel about it.
I noted the time to go in genuine excitement. After all, 2 years of hard work have paid off and it’s time to receive the paycheck (or these days, the ‘ping’ of the bank app). 💰
That said, it feels like a formality, something that wouldn’t amount to much. An inconsequential, insignificant, unimportant event towards which any fear or worry has been dissolved by the delay between cause and effect, the action and the response. If it were a phone you were about to buy, the camera seems less clear. If it were a potato crisp, it’s lost its crunch. 🍟
This is the case with all problems, obstacles, struggles and challenges in life: close up, they seem so problematic. In the here and now, they are all you can think about and if you don’t fix them, your life will surely come crashing down, tumbling and crumbling due to the force of monstrous storms 🌪️
But, as we’ve come to consider in the past 2 weeks, this is all your mind playing tricks on you, weighed down by recency bias and an inaccurate imagination of the future. If When this happens, here’s 2 things you can do:
Look up into the sky - I’ve done this many a time in the past year during my walks home. When I feel miserable or burdened by a problem, I gaze at the vast blueness of the sky, stretching far beyond my eyes can see. It grounds me down to earth as I realise my true scale in the universe, and hence how meagre and minute my trouble is.
This reminds me of a tweet I can’t get enough of
The 5x5 rule - on my way back from school once, my friend Dan (a reader of the blog) and I pressed the button to cross the road, then crossed before the light turned green, making many cars having to stop for no reason at all.
I voiced some empathy for the drivers. But Dan said, “no one is going to go home today and say, “Guess what, there were these 2 ill-mannered boys on my way back that made us all wait at a signal for 30 whole seconds. It spoilt my day.”
“There goes a saying
If you won’t worry about it in 5 years, then don’t worry about it for more than 5 mins.”
I’ve just found out its academic name - the 5x5 rule. The premise is: hold on, keep things in perspective, it’s not worth thinking about. In the long run, it won’t matter as much. It will be fine, making worrying a pointless waste of your energy and your time.
In immediacy, problems appear so much worse than they are - when they are zoomed in, smack in front of your face. Fast forward into the future, see how minor of a deal it becomes and with this realisation, let it go (cue Elsa’s loud high-pitched shrill for the 593th time ❄️)
Thought: Seems that I’m writing about perspective and the way we see things a lot. Perhaps I should become an optician 👓, following after my dad, as a doctor, as most people expect me to when meeting us. 👨⚕️
Book of the week 📖
My books also went on holiday this week so I couldn’t read. Had a gloss over How To Be A Brit by George Mikes that I found lying around. Gave me a few chuckles, do click on the link and maybe even buy it, all you Britons. Warning: some archaic 1900s references.
Podcast of the week 🎙️
Taken for Granted: John Green Wants You to Pay Attention to your Attention
Found this dug deep in my downloaded episodes. Such a joyful conversation between great thinker Adam Grant and John Green, whom I’d never heard of before but is proved to be a super interesting guy. Click for the title, and stay for the child-like happiness between the two.
Article of the week 📰
A day in the life of a Chinese robotaxi driver, MIT Technology Review
My Notion page (where I save articles worth sharing to) is being shoved stuff to send your way, as I plough through my emails.
China is known for their technological strengths; here we hear from someone who is well-versed in what the future holds. And hot take: he isn’t scared of losing his job to robots.
Quote of the week💬
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.” Epictetus
What has gone has gone. What’s to come will come and will be fine. All is well - stay in the present yet look into the future.
Adi