Journal

In writing my goals for this year, I realized there was a theme to the goals. They all revolve around mindfulness—doing things in my life with intentionality and thought. As the years go by, I’m noticing that it’s easy to revert to negative behaviors. Doing things well is hard. To combat this, my goals for this year require me to be intentional and proactive.

Communicate mindfully with others

This year I will focus on mindful communication—thinking before I speak, speaking precisely, and speaking with kindness. In the past, I’ve mostly often fallen into this trap of not being intentional when communicating with my wife. I think it’s a sort of auto-pilot that engages when I’ve been with someone for so long. So this goal is to break away from the defaults and be mindful of how I communicate.

While I’m less bad about doing this with strangers and friends, I should cultivate it in those relationships as well.

Eat with intentionality

I will focus on what I put in my body, aiming to mostly fill my hunger with foods that are good for my body. Sometimes due to boredom, I graze at calories I don’t need. Sometimes due to hunger, I eat things that aren’t healthy for my body. I will think more about each bite I take and not be afraid to stop eating.

Eat mostly vegetarian

When possible, eat vegetarian. When socially or culturally necessary (mostly traveling), don’t. Being mostly vegetarian allows me to moderate my ecological and ethical footprint, an ideal that is important to me. This goal—or a variation of it—has been on my list for many years. I think it is worth continuing to note it so that I keep it front and center, reminding myself what I care about.

Read for one hour each day

(And one hour and thirty minutes on days off.) I’ve been pretty good about reading this last year, but I want to make the goal more consistent. I also want to fill wasted time with this habit. Because of this, I’m making the goal a daily one and setting the bar relatively high. If I just browse the internet one hour less, it should be easy to find the time. The energy could be the challenge! I’ll allow makeups and prepaying.

Don’t browse the internet first thing in the morning or last thing at night

I have a bad habit of mindlessly grabbing by phone or tablet first thing in the morning and last thing at night. The goal here is to start small and build throughout the year. Starting with five minutes in the morning at first, and longer in the evening, I will put down my device and spend that time doing something else. In the evenings this will likely be reading; in the mornings it will likely be sitting on my back porch drinking a morning drink and enjoying the fresh air. As the year goes on, I’m hoping to increase the span on both sides to as much as one hour in the morning and two in the evening. We will see!

Run a 13+ mile run at least once a month

I’ve done pretty well running in 2022. One thing I did less well was finding the time and energy for long runs. My goal is to revitalize my long runs, doing at least one 13+ mile run each month. Supporting this will be shorter runs of course, but they’re not my main focus this year.

End the year owning fewer things than when I started

Ideally, don’t purchase or take home unnecessary things. I have enough things in my life for the most part. I will focus on the utility of things and not be wasteful. I don’t have a huge problem with getting excess things, but I’m fairly bad about getting rid of older things. Focus on the second half of this equation without letting up on the first half.

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This year has a mixture of some new goals and some old ones. Overall, the direction I’d like to head in remains mostly the same this year. I feel good about my ability to face these head on and become incrementally better throughout the course of the year.

Happy 2023!

The book is a short, broad, and dense three-part book on the history of China-Korea relations. I found the book deeply insightful. The book moves fast. The first part of the book covers the years 1392 through 1866; the second the years 1866 through 1992; and the third covers modern relations between the nations. Personally, I found more value in the first two parts more than the contemporary section.

Here’s some insights I gathered from reading this.

The author applied Confucian principles to explain the relationship between the two nations in the first section of the book (pg 27)—

Understanding what it meant to be Korean or Chinese was impossible without understanding Confucian principles. They connected the two countries, and sometimes drove them apart through different understandings or applications of the same principles.

The relationship between the two nations can be framed one of the fundamental Confucian relationship, brotherhood (pg 41)—

The Ming were the older brother of the Chosŏn. The rights and obligations that existed between older and younger brothers in the Confucian rulebook also went for the relationship between the two states.

Ultimately internal Chinese conflict in the years after the transition from the Ming to the Qing, along with Japanese ambitions changed the status quo (pg 87)—

For the Qing the full Japanese annexation of Korea was what they had dreaded most. And yet they were incapable of countering it. By 1910, domestic strife in China was again on the rise

Overall the book is well worth a read. Easy, quick, and meaningful. I highly recommend it.

So went the dream. Or whatever it was.

Dance Dance Dance was not as enchanting as A Wild Sheep Chase, but is still worth a read. The book is the continuation of the story for the latter and is technically the third (or forth depending on how you are counting) of a series. As expected, it includes all of the major Murakami cliches—but not in tiring amounts.

The real challenge I had with this book was the long middle portion. While Murakami’s books meander—and that’s part of the joy of his writing—this one especially seemed to have distinct settings for the middle and the beginning/end of the book. This made it a bit disjointed for me and the ending felt rushed.

To be honest, much of ability to enjoy Murakami books is situational—I think a reread is in order for this book. Perhaps I’ll enjoy it more in another day or time.

I put this book in the category of books everyone should read. Perhaps I’d even say that this is a book everyone should read multiple times in their life.

How to Love is a short little book of one page advice on relationships, centered on mindfulness and a Zen Buddhist mindset. It’s highly approachable and succinct. It’s the sort of book that wants you to take your time and think about what you’ve read. And to consider how it applies to your life.

I would highly recommend this to anyone who is in a relationship or wants to be in a strong relationship. This is such a great book to read slowly and discuss with your partner. Even if you disagreed, it would lead to a great conversation.

I am suggesting that two centuries of a strong state and liberal economies may have socialized us so that we have largely lost the habits of mutuality and are in danger now of becoming precisely the dangerous predators that Hobbes thought populated the state of nature.

This was a great rambling—while somehow also straightforward—read. It felt like the classic rambling history professor that I personally enjoy greatly. Short little ‘fragments’ of explorations related to anarchism make up the larger book.

The one downside of this books is that the fragments are only somewhat related to one another: there is a lack of glue and clear takeaways.

Nonetheless, the book is though-provoking and a fun read. I do recommend this as a fun starter to begin thinking about these ideas.