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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1812 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for December 20, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm about 12,000 miles from home and looking forward to a lonely Christmas with the Lord of the Rings trilogy and a bottle of Scrumpy to keep me company. Hopefully I won't cry too much. How are you getting through the holiday season?

My life is also pretty bad lately, but I definitely did something interesting:

  1. I celebrated the Winter Solstice, not Christmas
  2. I gave my children strange, cheap gifts which they loved (despite everyone's eagerness to open them, the eldest was extremely insistent that we open them one at a time so that he didn't miss any present)

Details are here: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/happy-solstice-eve

Downside - may not work with only Lord of the Rings characters to hang around with Upside - Label presents in Futhark which you learned from that old copy of The Hobbit when you were a kid, and Tolkein is there is spirit

I'm going to be spending New Years thousands of miles away from home too at New York (If you're gonna be at Times Square at NYE too, that's the closest another mottizen is probably getting to me lol). I finished up a brutal project at work that required many sleepless nights, so treating myself with a little vacation.

It's good to shed a few tears while watching LOTR. There's always a part of FOTR and one or two parts of ROTK that make me very emotional. Frodo and Gandalf talking in Moria ("I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened. - So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All you have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given to you" and the ending(s).

Not the worst Christmas, even if you might be shedding tears from separation instead.

Apart from a Christmas dinner, I will be putting a lot of time into meditation over the next couple of weeks. The holiday season always brings fresh intensity to the need to do the work to attain more liberation from the mind and the foolishness of humanity.

Wow! I’m spending the holidays in China with my GF’s family. My home is near SF and I’m only 7000 miles away!

I’ll probably spend Christmas losing money playing Mahjong.

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