Monthly Archives: February 2014

Get back to normal, whatever my normal is.

I know this is odd feelings. When I feel good, I feel something is wrong, i.e., I chronically feel not good in last few years.

Of course the last part of this statement is exaggerated. Like I often wrote, I enjoyed volunteering as a TA at McMaster. I felt good then. Meeting my friends is fun of course. But I often have that feelings, and it happened this morning when I was driving to my work place. I know why I felt good; as I wrote in a previous post, MVP workers’ smile makes me happy, and it was yesterday (it is usually on Monday but it was a holiday this week). But feeling good on the way to work is odd, honestly. The reason of the feelings this morning was obvious, but seriously, I often feel something is wrong when I feel good.

As I wrote in an old post, I have not spent “normal life” in last couple of decades. This is what I wrote then.

In last couple of decades, I always do two things simultaneously; doing a full-time job or equivalent like being a full-time student, and preparing for the next step. What I mean by “living normally” is to do one full-time job and spend spare time on hobbies without worrying about next step.

Now I have a full-time job, but I do not think I have settled down. As I wrote in another previous post, I felt so unstable when I was a temporary employee. And even now I still feel unstable. The reason is obvious as I wrote in a recent post. Now, do I need to redefine “normal life”? Like described in an internet article that I referred to in another previous post, life is uncontrollable. Should I accept that being unstable is normal? Maybe I should. But this does not mean I should give up. Perhaps in the future I will spend abnormal stable life. Who knows?

February 19, 2014Permalink

Nothing personal

I often wish my job was my primary part of my life. I’m not saying, of course, that I want to be a workaholic. I mean, if I was doing a dream job, spending the majority of time on the job must have been ideal. I remember I wrote something like this in an old post. Unfortunately, my current job is way far from my dream job (not like the distance between Halifax and Vancouver but between Toronto and Mars). It “occupies” the majority of my day excluding sleeping (I guess this is why it is called occupation), and it is the most unpleasant time for me. When something at work irritates me, I tell myself “nothing personal” in my mind, and when I get on my car to leave the work place, I loudly tell myself “I forgot that”.

One of the things I do at work is to ask supervisors to select a weekly MVP worker and to do some paper work for that. I often need to urge them to do it for some reasons, which is quite unpleasant for me and probably for them in some degree as well. When it happens, I tell myself “nothing personal”. But when every MVP has been selected, paper work has been done, and a manager announces the MVP workers, everyone smiles. Their smile makes me happy. I could think this is something personal.

I could say “not only unpleasant things but happy things also happen, so this job is good”. This is so called positive thinking, which I think does not help a lot. The premise of positive thinking, I think, is that you can judge everything to be either positive or negative, like “half full” or “half empty”, and that thinking positively is a good attitude. Really? I prefer to, or in other words I wish I could, see everything as it is. The attempt to interpret everything as something positive or negative can be a cause of unpleasant feeling. Buddhism tells 色即是空、空即是色 (something is nothing, nothing is something), and this is probably what I need now. As for the “half full” or “half empty” issue, the premise of positive thinking is that being full is positive and being empty is negative. Can’t we see everything as it is? Nothing is positive, nothing is negative, nothing is personal.

As I wrote in a previous post, what I experience now will eventually form myself for the future. Whether it is something personal or business, it will form my personality. It seems better to see everything as it is and select what to be. Let’s see.

February 5, 2014Permalink