Going with the flow.

I have had a lot of requests for more Kai pictures. So I'm sure nobody reading this blog will mind if one pops up here in there with no relevance whatsoever to what I'm writing about.

After a bad day with low confidence in my academic abilities, self-doubt and a lot of irritability with everything else, I had a good deep sleep, woke up happy and have since had a string of days where I find myself just accepting everything, enjoying where I am and having a general inner peaceful feeling. I guess some days are just so bad that afterwards you intuitively learn what thoughts and feelings should be let go of and not followed.

I made a joke some months ago about being irritable and snappy and then followed it up with "I really am a happy person by nature, it's just been these past few years that I've been so aauuugghhh." Someone else joked by counting the years that Joey and I have been married and finding that to be equal to the 'aauuugghhh'. It's not Joey, it's just life and the act of accomplishing all you set and continue to set out to do. Tasks to be done towards those accomplishments (whether it's getting a degree, building a boat, planning a wedding or raising a happy family) won't ever lighten up unless you decide to be bored for the rest of your life. To me that means getting back to a kind of 'go with the flow' mentality I use to go by before I had the chance to take advantage of all the opportunities I currently have. Back then I didn't even realize I lived with this specific mentality until one day when I was sitting in the office of a very well respected scientist who was helping me write my statement of purpose for my graduate school application. He was trying to convey how important the statement of purpose is and how it should really WOW the acceptance committee: "it should be so good that it hovers over all the others" as he held a manila envelope a few inches off the table and moved it around like a little manila hovercraft. "Makes sense" I thought, nodding back. "You don't want it to seem like you just bumped into all your research experiences..." but anything he said after that just starting sounding like Charlie Brown's teacher (or any other adult character) on the phone ('wa wac wac wa wah wah') because, although I gave him the 'uh-huh, go ahead keep talking, I'm totally attentive' look, my mind was jumping back and forth from memory to memory about how I really did just kind of bump into all of my research experiences...I was just going with the flow. I love to learn and just by seeking out more knowledge, a research opportunity would pop up and I'd go through with it until I bumped into another research opportunity with even more interesting things to learn. Fortunately the University of Washington accepted me despite my apparent bumbling nature. This guy had a point though and a good one if you are a very serious career-minded person with no time for games. I'm not that kind of person but at times would play the role of one only to find the occurrence of more and more 'aauuugghhh' moments. As you move forward in your career, it's easy to get caught up in the competitive and somewhat single-track environment with colleagues who live and breath their work.

So I'm re-learning that head nod. That way when something doesn't work out as planned or someone insists something needs to be done right away, I can just nod and continue to go with the flow rather than gripping on to getting XYZ completed in this way by that time. After several years, I think I have finally gained a steady confidence in my ability to adapt to the unexpected movement of this flow and realized that forcing myself to do anything uncharacteristic of me ends up breaking me down into a person I don't want to be...like a cranky mini-van mom (my antithesis).

Peace.