Last week I added a chapter to my Pychyl summary, posted my first chunk of epistemology notes, posted some of my drawing exercises to DeviantArt, and began reviewing my project choices.
The epistemology notes are for the book’s introduction, and I’d written them ages ago when my agenda for the project was different, so I wanted to revise them first, but I only got halfway through and decided to just post what I had. So I’ll finish those revisions and then continue adding chapters.
I haven’t felt very enthusiastic about my drawing exercises, so I surveyed my project ideas for the arts, asked myself some evaluative questions, and was reminded that one of my wishes is to contribute insights to my fields of interest. So I’ll probably prioritize projects that express my own ideas rather than summarizing others’. I don’t know if I have much that’s truly worthwhile to contribute at this point, but I’ll let other people decide that.
Along those lines, the procrastination book is going to take too long if I keep going at this rate, so I’d like to try something different, highlighting the parts of the book that stood out to me rather than summarizing everything in it.
Last Tuesday I took the day off of work to hang out with a friend from out of town who had a long layover in Chicago. He was pretty tired, so we didn’t do much, which gave the day a nicely laid back feel. We had lunch scheduled with some local Debian users, so we headed downtown and wandered around the office building we’d be eating in. At one point we descended a moving escalator to the second level of the basement, only to find that there was construction blocking the up escalator, and the only other place to go was through a security door into the office area. So we had fun running up the down escalator toward freedom. It was harder than I expected. After an animated lunch conversation with interesting people, we headed back to the airport, where we found a very cushiony bench to wait on next to the security line. One thing I’ve noticed about pursuing all my areas of interest at once is that it seems to give me a lot more to talk about. It’s nice to find conversation partners who can engage with me on more than one of them. Especially when I have six hours to kill with them! Not that we only talked about the things I’m doing, of course.
On Saturday I attended a workshop for the Immanuel mentor team. One of our trainers is being ordained this week, so the head of the training program was in town and wanted to make good use of her time here. I’m glad, because not only is it always good to see her, the workshop clarified some key themes of Immanuel prayer for me. One facet of integrating the dissociated parts of ourselves is verbalizing those parts together and sitting with the conflict to see what arises from it. In Immanuel we start by establishing a loving connection with the Lord, and we return to it often throughout the session, but at times it serves the recipient to let them experience the pain they’ve been avoiding. It’s part of sharing the truth about ourselves with the Lord so he can address and heal it. I came away from the workshop with a renewed sense of the value of this kind of prayer.
