2 Apr - 8 Apr 2018
I don’t have much to report this week. It’s been a quiet four-day week at work where I’ve been preparing for the new quarter and having a bit of a spring clean out of the office.
LEGO
I spent most evenings this week working on my LEGO oriental vignette. I didn’t get it finished in time to enter it into the LEGO Rebrick competition though. It was also my first LUG meetup since joining Brick Central. It was a fun few hours hanging out with like-minded AFOLs to geek out about our favourite plastic bricks.
Kettlebells PB
I finally hit a personal best on the strict military press with a 24kg kettlebell. It had originally been my goal to hit it in Q4 2017 but niggling arm injuries prevented it. It’s a nice milestone to have hit and gives me much needed motivation to keep working to meet my ultimate goal this year of pressing a 32kg kettlebell by the end of September.
Gratitude reminder
The weekend was marred with having a headache for most of it, which really put a dent in my plans although I pushed past it to still train and hit my PB. However it is a chance to be reminded how healthy I usually am and to be grateful for that.
Reading progress
I started _How to have a good day_and although it’s still early days I am really enjoying it. It’s quite refreshing to see so many references to back up what’s being presented. It’s also quite gratifying to see that many of the practices I’ve already adopted are in the book, backed by research and I can certainly relate to the benefits it posits.
I also started and finished Darkly Dreaming Dexter. A quick, quite fun read. It wasn’t too cerebral and it was interesting to see how it differed from the TV series. I’ve also got the second book in the series, Dearly Devoted Dexter, to read too. It’s really got me itching to re-watch the TV show again too though…
A week in Stoicism
This week we focused on premeditation of evils, (prae-meditatio malorum) In other words, negative visualizations to prepare yourself for the unexpected events that can disconcert us and divert us from our purpose.
Look at life through a lens of trust, but verify. Hold things up to the light and inspect them - especially our biases and preconceived notions about how the world appears. Interestingly, these self-same things are what Webb talks about in How to have a good day where it’s important to train yourself to allow your more deliberate system to have a chance to properly evaluate before your automatic systems kick in with a less thought-out response.
”Being unexpected adds to the weight of a disaster, and being a surprise has never failed to increase a person’s pain. For that reason, nothing should ever be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent out in advance to all things and we shouldn’t just consider the normal course of things, but what could actually happen. For is there anything in life that Fortune won’t knock off its high horse if it pleases her” Seneca
weeknotes