The First Day Of The Rest Of Another Life

I’ve spent most of the past four weeks either packing, unpacking, or travelling. Perhaps it was no surprise that we were so ken to unpack quickly this time round. Arriving home at dinnertime on Saturday, we had suitcases in storage just after breakfast on Sunday and now at mid-morning on Monday, the apartment is clean and back to normal. For me, today is a GTD-day; collect the inbox, process to zero, review everything, trust the system.

The past few weeks have been hard. It was nice to spend some time on the beach, nice to see Sydney again, nice to visit Adelaide (albiet briefly). But, my mother and father have been unwell, my father-in-law passed away (though his memorial service was a great tribute to a life well lived) and we learnt last night that a friend’s mother passed away yesterday.

And, I have a list of friends I didn’t manage to catch up with during these weeks – that’s something I don’t feel good about.

But, life goes on. I’m no expert on karma, but my feeling is that what I can do is embrace the desire to do better and try to simply my life so there is more time for people, for storytelling and for patience. The truth is that I often choose to make myself impatient by the way I organise myself – much like the person who books meetings back to back then feels stressed because of the “busyness” of their day.” I like to think I’m becoming better at leaving space in my plans for “life” to break in – it’s a nice thought anyway.

This week is filled with things I’ve been putting off over the last month, from small organisational tasks to bigger projects and dreams. There’s lots of home stuff, family stuff and parenting stuff to sort through. There’s also some promising blog drafts, on the changing face of Sydney, the social media thing and the future of culture and architecture in Hong Kong that I’m working on.