shadowsf2 - Tumblr blog

shadowsf2 · 26 days

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Rest versus rejuvenation

A year or so ago, I came across a post on Facebook that really hit home. I can’t find the actual post at the moment, but it went something like this:

When your phone’s battery is redlining, you can turn the phone off to conserve power, but at some point in time, you’re going to need to plug it in and recharge it.

There is a difference between rest and rejuvenation.

One of the big reasons why I retired from classroom teaching last June is that I had allowed my entire life to fall into cycles of “get ready to teach, teach, and recover from teaching”. Work -- which I did find rewarding, which is why I did it for 34 years -- had come to drive everything I did in my life, including what I did in my personal time.

For many years, my two favorite vacation destinations have been Las Vegas and Disney World. I’d head to Las Vegas on long weekends and short breaks from school, and every summer, I’d head to Orlando for a week at Disney World as a way of celebrating the end of another school year.

These trips were great at helping me rest, but they didn’t rejuvenate or invigorate me.

I used to have hobbies that did that. Starting in the mid-1990’s, I played Magic the Gathering seriously. I’d build decks, spend Saturdays at my local game shop playing against whoever else was there, and read about new decks and strategies that might improve my play. At the same time, I also got into “advantage play” in casinos, mostly by counting cards. Again, I’d spend hours practicing at home, talking to other advantage players, going to casinos to play, and then analyzing my results to see how I was doing and how I might improve.

These activities genuinely rejuvenated me. The energy and enthusiasm that I put into them gave me more of the same in return.

Somewhere along the line starting in the early 2000’s. I stopped doing things that rejuvenated me in favor of things that helped me rest. I stopped being an advantage player in casinos (which takes a lot of time and energy) and just started going to Las Vegas for fun. Instead of building, playtesting, and refining my own Magic decks, I’d play with preconstructed ones online in casual play. I didn’t have the time or energy to engage with my hobbies in the way that I used to, so I let them become things that I did when I wanted or needed to turn my brain off and just crash for a while.

So about a year ago, I began looking for a hobby that engaged me more deeply. I eventually rediscovered Minecraft, and that turns out to be fitting the bill right now. I first encountered Minecraft in 2012 but played it only casually. Since I picked it up again, I’ve been digging more deeply into it to learn more about what you can do in the game. I definitely enjoy farming and resource-gathering, and a lot of my current projects require me to learn more about redstone and what folks have dubbed “technical Minecraft”. I’ve also gotten hooked on the YouTube series HermitCraft, which follows the shenanigans of the players on the private HermitCraft server, and I’ve started interacting with other fans of the series online.

It’s nice having something in my life that recharges my battery instead of simply helping me rest.

#minecraft #hobbies #rejuvenation

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shadowsf2 · 29 days

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Mindfulness and being a frog

I’ve had a mindfulness practice for about 20 years now.

My favorite definition of mindfulness is this:

Mindfulness is being aware of what is going on inside you and around you, without making any sort of judgment about it.

Recently, I had a wonderful reminder about how important this definition is.

My boyfriend and I had made plans to spend the weekend in San Jose, CA, at a fandom event. We’ve attended this event annually for many years, but this time around, neither of us was really looking forward to it. We talked about canceling but ultimately decided to go, and we were there from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon.

For me, the first 24 hours or so were thoroughly OK. There wasn’t anything specifically wrong, but I kept on getting irritated by lots of little things. We did our fandom stuff, saw some friends, and went out to eat at a lot of our favorite places in the area. It was also nice to just be away from home for a few nights.

Come Saturday evening, I had worked myself into a massive hissy fit about nothing in particular. I turned in relatively early -- maybe 9 pm or so -- while my boyfriend stayed out for a few more hours. While I was winding down in the hotel room, I did some physical therapy, and that included doing stretches for my neck and shoulders.

Afterwards, I noticed that my mood had improved significantly. I realized that my neck had been causing me a great deal of pain all weekend long. It hadn’t pinged my radar because the pain had come on gradually. If it had hit me quickly, I would definitely have noticed it, but because it had started out as a faint twinge and then progressively gotten worse over the course of a few days, I’d adapted to it and considered it normal. It wasn’t until physical therapy had mitigated the pain that I realized how much I’d been hurting and how much the pain had been making me cranky and irritable all weekend long.

So back to our definition of mindfulness: “Mindfulness is being aware of what is going on inside you and around you, without making any sort of judgment about it.”

In this case, I had completely missed the boat on being aware of what was going on inside my body. Because the pain had increased gradually, I had endured and adapted to it, even when it reached the point where I couldn’t twist my neck at all without wincing.

There’s a story (untrue, as it turns out) that if you drop a frog in boiling water, it’ll jump out of the pot, but if you put the frog into a pot of cold water and then slowly bring it to a boil, the frog will stay there until it dies because the gradual temperature change allows it to adapt to worsening conditions until it’s too late. I was definitely a frog in this case.

I sometimes get asked what role mindfulness is for. For me, mindfulness is a tool that helps me navigate my life more smoothly and understand what’s going on when things get bumpy.

#mindfulness

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shadowsf2 · 30 days

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I've been meaning to start a personal blog for some time now, and today, I decided to stop procrastinating and just dive in and create it without really having a plan about what to do next. "Diving in without a plan" is a fairly new thing for me. My usual M.O. is to make outlines, timelines, and lots of bullet-pointed lists. And that's not always a good thing, as I can easily get bogged down in planning and never get around to actually doing anything. So we'll see how this goes, but I consider the fact that I just jumped into this without a clue to be a Sign of Growth. Yay!

So who am I?

My name is Shadow, and I'm a 56-year-old queer cis man who lives in San Francisco. At the end of June 2023, I stepped away from a 34-year career as a high school teacher, and I'm currently exploring what might come next.

Some of the things I might write about here include:

The aforementioned search for "what might come next"

Teaching, learning, and curriculum development

Mindfulness and its role in my life

My ongoing quest to nurture a growth mindset

Learning differences and how they impact me

My hobbies, which currently include Minecraft, the Disney parks, casino gaming, and re-binge watching TV shows that I love.

Hey look! I seem to have written the first post for this blog! Go me!

#intro post

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