Welcome to Ideothetic Flow, my newsletter sharing my reflections on finding balance, sufficiency, and security.
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Hi!
Merry christmas! I hope you've had a good holiday season and are enjoying the last few days before into the swing of a new year. My office is closed this week, so its been a good chance to look back into the year, share some of what I thought went good and bad for me, and set my intentions for next year.
2023: The Good
Travel
In a post pandemic revenge travel spree, we did 6 family holidays this year, along with a JB trip without the kids, and a work trip for wavemaker. Levi turns 2 in a month, so this year was our chance to travel without needing an extra plane ticket for him.
I feel like I deserve a pat on the back for braving these trips with the kids. It was tiring, but I'm glad we went through it so they would have some different experiences (even if they are likely to forget them). We definitely feel like everyone grows up a little after each trip.
Career
Through a series of coincidences and good timing, I started a job at Wavemaker this year, and i'll be hitting my 1 year anniversary soon.
Since having Joy, career has been left out of focus while I kept capacity for the kids and my hobbies. Now that Levi is no longer a newborn, and Joy is more independent, I have more capacity to give attention to my own career development, and its been nice to be able to properly throw myself into interesting work, with good colleagues, while balancing things at home.
Martial arts grades - pretending I know how to fight
I didn't manage to train as much as I would have liked this year due to various sicknesses - finally catching covid also set me back several months of cardio. However, I still made some good progress in all my different arts, and picked up my 5th grade in Wing Tsun, and 2 stripes at BJJ (now a 3 stripe white belt). Belts and grades aren't as important as actual improvement, but its nice to have an objective marker that I am moving forward in my hobby.
2023: The bad
Health
My body has taken quite a toll this year. I haven't been sleeping well, and the sleep debt from night wakes is catching up. Between carrying the kids on all the holidays, going for training, and a lack of proper recovery, I've also accumulated some injuries that haven't properly healed.
My mental health has also worsened. I've been neglecting self care, and I find my emotional state very volatile. Its taking more and more effort to keep my mind clear and my mood in control.
Overwhelm
While I feel I got quite abit done this year, it has also felt hectic and tiring. I was multitasking too much - replying messages while driving, or trying to work while watching the kids or on the go. I also let myself get distracted by notifications and mindless content.
Most of my output this year was more a result of brute force than focused efficiency. I didn't do a good job of carving out proper space and context so that I can get things done peacefully.
Connection
This year I've not done enough to keep up with many of my friends. Friends who I used to meet quite often, I only managed to catch a few times over the year. Organic opportunities to meet with friends came by less frequently.
Probably a mix of everyone growing older and having children, I need to be more intentional about keeping up my connections, and put in more effort to do so.
For those friends reading this, if we haven't met up in awhile, let's please do coffee sometime next year!
Intentions for 2024
Joyfulness in parenting
One reflection from my travels is that focusing on keeping the kids in line is a very unenjoyable part of the parenting experience.
Parenting has so many things to get right - safety, development, values. In the midst of trying to do all these well, its easy to forget that I should be enjoying the parenting journey, and they want to be enjoying the company of their parent, not someone policing their actions all the time.
Next year, I want to keep joyfulness in mind as I parent, and in everything else I do. I want myself and the kids to be happy, and not stress over getting everything perfectly right - after all, adults aren't getting things perfect too, why should I hold them to such a high standard.
Deliberate competency
For the last few years, I've tended to improve myself organically and intuitively. I could go by what felt most appropriate in each situation, and improve that intuition as I did more. I think I'm starting to reach a saturation point, where its easy to end up stagnating. If I want to be better, I need to be deliberate at improving my skills.
For 2024, I plan to put aside some time between tasks, and set aside proper reflection time, to see how I can work better. It could be improving my communication, my substantive knowledge, or just being more productive.
Quiet recovery
I also want to do better at resting. Proper, quiet rest.
Its easy to blame the kids for being tired, but the real reason is that I have been doing a bad job at rest and recovery. I procrastinate, stay up for no reason, and get myself stuck on short form content (or sudden late night slay the spire runs). I find this both wastes time and leaves my mind too busy.
If you did a similar kind of review of your 2023, or are thinking about how you might want to change things up in 2024, do drop me a reply to share! I think it will be interesting to check in again after the first quarter of 2024 to see if we have kept to our intentions and how its working out.
Thanks for being with me through this year, and wishing you a happy new year and an even better 2024.
James
For tarot based reflections and journal prompts, check out @thecenterline_ on IG
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Take care and have a good week!
James
Thank you for sharing your reflections. I also create specific intentions and goals for each new year, then reflect at year’s end through that lens.
2023 has been one of the richest years of my life. I accomplished or made real progress getting started on intentions for the year.
1. Continue my „A Year to Live“ project and bring it to close on February 28.
I can’t overstate the importance of working through this year to me and my relationships. I‘m still too close to distill it, so I won’t try yet.
What I hadn’t considered - or imagined completely differently - was how I’d feel after the year ended, so I was surprised by the feeling of loss (at no longer thinking about my own death everyday!) and „now what-ness“ in early March. Navigating the new „Now What“ was/continues to be an unexpected continuation of the project.
2. Start and make progress on a 1000 days project
I see I’m the one blocking my creative expression, but couldn’t logic myself around perfectionistic tendencies inhibiting me, so I devised a project that would last longer than I can really imagine, in which frequent failure wouldn’t mean failure of the whole. When I reach 1000 days of any creative self expression, it will be finished. Then I will find out what it’s about. I don’t need to wait for a brilliant idea to start.
I worked on it 165 days this year. Although there was some sewing, some drawing and an ongoing photography thing happening, most of those days were the months I spent designing and building a temple. In September, 150 of us filled the completed temple with photos, letters and other remembrances. Then we burned it. It was sublime.
3. Embrace responsibility, whatever that means.
This has meant becoming more practiced at observing and owning my life past and present. My good or bad choices, areas of resistance and impulsivity, that part feeling sorry for myself and the vicious self critic. It would have been impossible without my prior and ongoing work on compassion.
I also took on leadership roles that sometimes overwhelmed me, but that I carried to the end. I worked to notice the circumstances in which I overcommit, and trusted myself (in small pieces gathered over time) to do something hard all the way to the end, in the face of both appreciation and lack of it.
2024 Intentions and goals
1. More silliness, spontaneity and fun in my daily life.
I tamed the impulsive younger me by breaking her. Oops! It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’ve got to relearn what used to come naturally. My plan is to do some silly or spontaneous thing in hope of having fun and relearning how.
2. Reorient my introspective attention externally
After a few years of introspective meditation (and decades of hypervigilance over my interior life), the next step is to focus these skills to what‘s happening outside me. To start, I’ll be practicing situational awareness a few times a day. A randomly timed reminder will prompt me.
3. Grow my courage
This will likely be a kind of year long meditation, like responsibility. My first hard goal will be to stop apologizing, except when I‘ve acted against my values. I hear myself saying „I‘m sorry“ reflexively in social situations and have a sense it comes from anxieties, so drops of courage will be needed to sit with the discomfort of saying something different or nothing at all.
Best of luck in the coming year.