Here’s an interesting fact about me that you may never have known (though if you’ve read this blog carefully for a while, you may have guessed it). I’m kind of messed up. Kind of hung up and neurotic.
I stress about things. I overthink. I spend hours awake at night worrying about thing I have absolutely no control about.
I follow in a proud family tradition. I work at a university. My father before me also worked at a university. Though that’s where the similarities end. He had a proper university job – the one that requires you to have the letters Dr in front of your name. Me, I’m more of a university dilettante.
Anyway, as an official Dr type university person, one of the things my dad regularly had to do was go overseas to attend conferences, often to quite interesting locations. And while we’d miss him when he was away, it was still kind of cool because when he got back he’d have all sorts of gifts for us.
One of the things that makes me so much fun is that I’m a barrel of contradictions. I’m wild and crazy in a totally conservative way. I’m a young-at-heart grumpy old man. I’m a crazily optimistic pessimist – or possibly a crazily pessimistic optimist.
Today I’m going to delve a bit deeper into another of those contradictions.
2020 has not been a fun year. With bushfires and pandemics and all kinds of craziness, all over the world, this has definitely not been a year to savour.
One of the challenges of 2020 has been figuring how to get through. How do you make it to the end of the year, while retaining some level of sanity? How do you spend time productively, cultivating some kind of hope and positivity that things will improve?
As I work my way, day-by-day, through this strange and unpredictable thing called life, I’m constantly struck by the number of things I don’t understand. And then I had the most brilliant of revelations. There are heaps of things that I have no way of comprehending. And every week, I find myself struggling to figure out what to post in this blog.
