Preface: I’m continuing a thread from before the pandemic, from a year and three months ago… it seems like I’ve taken enough steps back in life that I can retrace my old advice, perhaps that was the reason I was motivated to write it back then? I always was writing to be helpful to just one person, perhaps that person was always meant to be myself?

Mission: restore harmony to my mind/myself /my life by breaking modern life down into the three arenas of 1. Connection – how I treat and enjoy people, 2. Acceptance – how I treat and enjoy myself, clearing my mind and accepting my emotions “as is” with no justification, 3. Action – my service to the world, currently tutoring my kids, cleaning my physical home ext, and 4. Harmony – the balance between the three areas of life and how to spend limited energy, time, and money with mindful intention.

Arena 1: Connection – Life Time Goal: Don’t be a complete jerk. Tools: Assertive Communication, Tactical Empathy, Observation, Sports Casting, Look Up, Look In.

Tiny Plan: Try to take the high road once a day (I used to have higher expectations but I’m a little pandemic fatigued still).

🗹 Connect with Other Humans – Saw a friend in person, it was amazing, very much worth it after so long, so deeply wish the pandemic had been managed in a different more targeted way so unaffected areas or people who had tested already could have lived with less isolation. It’s really invaluable to be with other people, I would almost trade 5 years of pandemic life for 1 year of regular life, life is really much richer with friends (in person friends).

🗹 Read books or Articles – Online friends or colleges, they are a welcome addition to life, they just kind of fill a different cup than in person support, they inspire me, they do uplift me as well, it’s just somehow not a substitute for in person support in the same way. Doctor’s visits have been okay online, music lessons are great, martial art’s lessons are okay, preschool hasn’t been as rewarding or easy, somethings translate very well, other things don’t.

🗹 Seek and Discuss Healing – I am doing my best to try to help my sister as just a sounding board for her own ideas to get out of her depression a little bit, I think it helps a lot that I’m not rushing her out or giving many suggestions, counter-intuitively wanting someone to get better or giving ideas can slow down their healing.

Arena 2: Acceptance – Life Time Goal: Live intentionally so the things that matter are the ones that don’t fall through the cracks. Tools: Gratitude, Kaizen.

Tiny Plan: Stop being over critical and don’t beat myself up for small mistakes or other people’s mistakes.

🗹 Radical Acceptance – Still a work in progress, but going well especially with cleaning and cooking, I clean and never finish the whole house, but I am keeping the basic health hazards completely under control and making more progress with the gross looking stuff and even slow progress towards making things look “elegant”. Cooking is going well too, we eat mostly healthy, mostly tasty stuff, it’s a bit redundant, but I was never a cook so it’s pretty decent from where I started.

“In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices.”

– Epictetus

🗹 See problems as opportunities. – I don’t do this 100% but I do look for at least one thing each week to work smarter at… so I did do this for Japanese language learning and restarted my journey with Kanjidamage which is an awesome funny, but really explicit website to learn Japanese easily in a fun way.

🗹 Create your own reality consciously. – I know it’s possible, I do it a little, but I wouldn’t say I’ve mastered it, definitely baby steps, like drinking tea instead of coffee in 2021 to prove to myself I can make life less redundant in the 2021 pandemic than the 2020 pandemic was by being a different person myself.

🗹 Clarify my Dreams, Intentions, Goals, and Plans Here – It’s been a large break, but it feels grounding to be back after about a year off.

Arena 3: Action – Life Time Goal: Do the right thing. Tools: Permaculture Gardening, Martial Arts, Stoic Living, Self Leadership, KonMari, Minimalism.

Tiny Plan: Teach martial arts weekdays 3 PM.

🗹 Malama Pono – Be forthright and proactive in your life. – I’ve feel like that honest part of me I had as a child has synced up with the adult me to produce and overly honest adult, but I’m good with that, that’s how I feel well.

🗹 Aloha ʻĀina, Teaching Martial Arts – Going okay, second class post pandemic, it’s just my kids, but they are still kids and they are having fun so perhaps that’s enough.

🗹 Cleaning – Starting to know how to clean and have good (but not necessarily expensive) tools (such as a steam mop, enough towels, not broken spray bottles, vinegar, blue dawn soap). Cleaning gets easier when you know how to do it and can do it in the same flow as normal, easier and faster and less draining.

Balance Between Arenas: Harmony – Life Time Goal: Allow myself to guard and restore my own well being for no other reason than it’s the right way to live. #mumlivesmatter

Tiny Plan: Try to find more time for fun things during the average day. 

🗹 Money: Be reasonable, but joyful about using what we have wisely. – Read “Happy Money” and I’ll hopefully never go back to the old way of thinking about money as a limited resource that runs out, money is more like renewable energy than oil, people can always make more money with service, with policy, with savings, in so many ways.

🗹 Creative Endeavors: Brainstorming, Drawing, Painting, Sculpting, Writing, Architecture. – I would want to do a bit more, but did do a pretty reasonable amount, did write and publish instead of just keeping another draft, did draw recently, not a ton, but a little, did a lot of garden design choices hanging the strawberries ext, doing a lot of brainstorming with curriculum and parenting choices, never thought about how much that drains my mental energy until now, but it really does. Designed and printed a math lesson “recognition” chart and a martial arts chart, little things like that aren’t so easy, to go from the idea to hanging the finished product in the same hour is a record turn around for me. Did a bit of ocarina sheet music in Inkscape too and learned a new song on ocarina.

Weekly Review:

12 Points of 12 Points = 100% this week though real life is never perfect I did have a medium amount of energy to bring to the table and that helped me restart martial arts, the only exercise I’ve done this year (rare for me) as well as doing a bit better at making music time fun, reading story books instead of showing movies at night and being calmer for language and math lessons.

Thank you readers for joining me today, it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these weekly reviews, but it feels good to be back because it’s interesting to see how much has changed. Notably lowered expectations of myself and more patience with my family, especially my daughter who I didn’t always know was a special needs child. I didn’t expect it to happen so fast, but I’ve made peace with being a special needs mum, it’s been about two months since she got her diagnosis and at first I was very resistant to identifying that way, to owning the amount of effort and patience I would need to put forth to be able to thrive as an individual in that situation or to help her in her situation, but I’m starting to be at peace with it, since it’s always been there whether I resist it or embrace it.

🌊