Life is hard. Life is full of struggles, big and small. Life is also full of precious moments and people. Life is also colourful and magical. Life is a m...
It is noisy in my head. New thoughts will jump out from hidden corner, taking over the existing thoughts, trying to take the space and attention of my consciousness (or my being, I am not sure the best word to describe the one that control my attention). That is the opposite of calmness and being present. The thing is, those thoughts and the whole power control make it hard to be in the present.…
When I was younger, I always aimed to minimise pain and maximise pleasure. I always tried to put in minimum amount of work to achieve something. I was that type of person, who always see the obstacles rather than the goals. Travelling to a beautiful new location, I always picked on the obstacles to worry about, like the long painful road (I used to get really bad car sickness), or the…
When I was a kid, I hated mundane housework such as sweeping the house, washing dishes and glasses, tidying up my study corner and so on. It's not because it's hard. But I found them mundanne, unimportant and didn't bring me any value. It didn't seem to help me getting getter grades or bring me new knowledge like reading and certainly not relaxing like watching TV or playing games. I found them a…
What did you do over the weekend? Anything fun to share? Sometimes I wonder what the purpose of a weekend is. It is supposed to be for resting and relaxing after 5 days of working or studying. But it has become all about catching up with other responsibilities that we cannot fit into the weekdays. Mine are grocery shopping and meal prep for the upcoming week laundry time with my daughter and…
I recently finished watching a Chinese costume drama - The double (in Vietnamese Mac vu van gian). It is a a long watch, 40 episodes. I was pleasantly surprised at myself for the patience I have and also what a pleasure it is to watch a good drama. It reminds me of the simple joy of watching a story unfolding slowly. The story is about revenge and romance, kinda what I always like watching. The…
I live in my head a lot. I realised that after doing meditation for a while. I daydreamed a lot as a student. Focusing on my classes is something too boring compared to what I can think in my head. I run to books and stories to live in those parallel worlds, instead of my present. I am usually sad, anxious and dreadful about some imaginative future and events that are not likely to happen (like…
We went to a strawberry farm to pick strawberry. It's not the cheapest or easiest option to have strawberries. But it is fun and the strawberries taste much better. Strawberries that we picked have different shapes and a variety of ripe levels. But they all smell and taste much better than those beautiful and identical looking strawberries off the shelf from the same farm. The weather was a bit…
This week, I struggled a lot at work. I felt emotionally unbalanced and always stressed out. The cause was not the difficulty of the work assignments, nor the sheer amount of work nor the deadlines. I was still trying to process my feelings, my stress signals to name the problem correctly. By the weekend, I felt quite sick and drained. Then I visited a garden with my family. It was a beautiful…
Sa loves playing with sand. But it became too messy and annoying to clean up after her everyday. So we took the whole set outside. It was very sunny. Our backyard is small and bare, with just some herbs and veggies pots, and some unused boxes and random stuff which can weather the outside. It was a bit too messy and not as picturesque as I would love it to be. There was no tree for shade. So we…
Making things is how I get swirling thoughts out of my head. In the moment of folding papers, I was there, complete.