Lessons from Last Week

The last week of my life has been met with a couple of changes. It’s been nothing crazy, but there were definitely a couple of lessons I have relearned. Several of those lessons are ones where you don’t really know what you have (or don’t have) until you go through the experience.

You don’t know how much stuff you have until you move house.

I have relearned this lesson far too many times. A week ago I moved house from one city to another about an hour away. I thought I had a decent grasp on the amount of stuff that I have, and what would be needed to shift. I vaguely remembered moving in the year before, and I’m pretty sure that most of my stuff fit into one car. Not this time around. It appears I have acquired more stuff over the year. I knew I was getting a few more things, but lifestyle creep truely does creep up on you.

The things that I have are highly useful though. It’s not like I had a bunch of stuff that I never use. Many things did provide some kind of convenience or comfort in some way. Maybe it’s one of those things that are just hard to measure. Some items are just things you shouldn’t go without due to the culture you live in, or the standard of living that you expect. This is why I could never count myself as a proper minimalist.

Side note: minimalists have been a cultural zeitgeist for a long time. I heard a reference to minimalists in Season 3 of Seinfeld. I guess it’s one of concepts that comes and goes out of fashion. I wonder what will be coming back into fashion again which we’ve forgotten about.

Relearning things isn’t as bad as you think it will be.

I’m going to be returning to my studies this year after having a year’s hiatus. I was a little nervous about taking a break because I knew I wouldn’t be able to study on my year off. So this week I was reapproaching the mathematical side of my studies. The concepts I’ve been going over are Laplace transforms, and this lead me to realise I would also need to cover partial fractions. At first I was concerned because I opened my maths book and felt like I couldn’t read the questions, or I wouldn’t know how to approach an answer to the questions posed. However, given some time, I was able to find video resources online, or just slowly parse the questions out. It’s not really as difficult as I first thought.

It’s one of those things that you just slowly pick up again. You’ll be rusty at first, and you’ll compare what you are now to what you were when you were at your peak in learning the content. It’s not a fair comparison though. Even now that I feel more confident, I know I’ll get even better when I get into the university papers later this month. I’m looking forward to knocking out a bunch of other concepts before I start my study again. I still need to cover Op Amps, and other electrical concepts. For now I’m focussing on the mathematical side of things because I think it’ll give a better base.

Conclusion

I hope whatever you’re doing with the start of 2023 is going well. If you feel reticent to restart a hobby, I encourage you to give it at least a week before you write yourself off. You’ll be surprised how much you remember, and how much you can actually do.

Stay safe, and make good choices.