Now that this is my main ‘online’ home, I feel like rambling about how things have gone now and then (looks like it’s about once a week for now). I have been so stressed with work recently, which is a source of guilt for me because I do enjoy my job and it feels weird to feel stressed about something that I enjoy doing.

This week was a little better – it was a lot of monotonous work, which is a bit boring but a good way to decompress for a bit. I got a lot of time to listen to podcasts. It’ll be back to the normal grind for the coming week, which will be fun but more stress, I guess?

It helped that I did absolutely nothing this weekend (unlike last weekend) – my brother and I just watched Detective Conan the whole day yesterday, and I went to the library today.

But what helped even more was the Advent sermon we had today. This year’s Advent theme is all about preparing for the future Advent – the second coming of Christ. It was a good reminder that my purpose in life is not work and that looking long term, my priorities should be different. There are a lot of things to takeaway from the sermons, but the one related to work is that my purpose in life is not to be a slave to my job. For some reason, I feel that being passionate about a job means being available 24/7, which clearly is just stressing me out. This was a good reminder that I have more important things in my life and that I need to figure out a way to stop working when I’m off-the-clock.

I don’t think that this is something that companies/bosses would necessarily want to hear (which is why they don’t know about this blog and I’m not telling them), but the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. Apart from mental health and spiritual reasons, keeping work at work means that I have time to properly rest. And being well-rested will help me to better focus on my job and enjoy it, which will probably mean fewer careless mistakes.

Now that I’ve typed it out, that sounds extremely elementary and I can’t believe that it took me so long to come to that realisation. But better late than never, I guess.

On a completely unrelated subject, my family and I also went for a concert yesterday (after watching all that Detective Conan). It’s a WIP showing so it’s not the complete show but it was very cool. It’s an experimental piece featuring the Ruan, electronic sound, and Indian dance and I really liked how they managed to merge all three together. I did feel very uncultured, though. Apparently part of the inspiration for the piece is the history of the Ruan, but I know nothing about it so I probably missed so much (like with the Tale of Genji and all the allusions it makes). It did make me want to read up on the history of the Ruan and Chinese instruments, so I’ll probably do that after I finish diving in the world of Heian Japan. Who knows, there may be a connection between the two?