Holidays
😌
I finished my Christmas shopping and made some more progress on the gift labels. I want to get through the main work on those in the next few days, but I’m far enough along that they shouldn’t be hard to finish while I’m on vacation. I could even procrastinate and do a gift tag all-nighter on Christmas Eve, a traditional and strangely nostalgic event for me, but overall I’d like to avoid it.
🙂
The Fullness of Time book series will be my guide through the church year. Getting a better handle on the church calendar has been one of my long-time wishes. A couple of years ago, a quote from the book on Lent in this series caught my ear, and so this year when the Advent book showed up in an ebook sale, I decided to pick up the series and see what it could do for me. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve listened to the Advent book, by Tish Harrison Warren, and the Christmas one, by Emily Hunter McGowin, and they have definitely added a layer to my reflections. In personable writing, the authors condense the history and meaning of these liturgical seasons to their core features so we know how to pay attention and enter into them.
Productivity
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I finished linking together some task dependency chains in Notion for my productivity system project. Then I created another timeline view that would make the tasks’ intended outcomes easier to scan through and prioritize. This project is still in the background while I work on the Christmas labels, but my main priorities on it now are simplifying the set of task stages, the way I organize my notes, and the way I record what I work on each day.
Spirituality
😎
AI music is helping me contemplate the eternal realm. Part of my spirituality of coping is to acknowledge that the Christian hope is tied more to the next life than this one (a theme relevant to Advent, incidentally). In my daily Bible reading I’ve been noticing this focus on the future world scattered throughout the New Testament, and I’ve begun asking myself what it looks like for the coming kingdom to shape our actions now. Since music is what carries me where I want to go, on a whim I decided to have Suno generate some operatic music based on the scene in Revelation 21-22. I wouldn’t call them opera, but the songs it created floored me, and I’ve had them stuck in my head since then, drawing my attention to the future like a magnet: “New Jerusalem (Version 1),” “New Jerusalem (Version 2).”
