A Thing or Two About Diligence: Why Isn't My Jet-lag Going Away Yet?!
Let's be perfectly honest: since coming back from working full-time in Korea, I have been a complete lazy stay-at-home bum. After applying for UK visa for the second time after that heartbreaking first-time rejection, I have been doing little more than hanging out with friends, watching TV, and updating this blog. Ironically, I tend to write the best posts when I am stimulated by the many personal experiences I get traveling around the world, yet it is often times like now when I am not traveling (and thus have little to write about) that I have the most free time to do casual writing.
And being unproductive is not the worst thing. Even after landing in American soil for more than a week now, I am still having trouble staying up beyond 10pm at night, and almost promptly wake up at 7am everyday without alarms or noises. And during the day, the constant tiresomeness, characterized by pains in the eyes and headaches fading in and out, just would not go away. Even the daily exercises of writing the blog and reading the news are proving to be difficult at times. It is certainly fortunate that no academic work needs to be done right now.
The constantly sub-par physical conditions makes me wonder just how can such huge change be possible after working in Korea for literally every waking moment from 8am to midnight and dangerously entertaining myself in equally tight schedules when I am not working. After returning to San Diego, I cannot even imagine myself to be physically capable of such things just a few days ago.
In the few days, justifying the abnormal physical conditions were easy. Besides jet-lag, I can simply blame the conditions on caffeine withdrawal (certainly could not have survived work in Korea without those instant coffee sticks) and even because of the excess energy to adjust to the dry hot climate of San Diego and home-cooked food (I still think the drinking water here have a nasty salty after-taste). But the rationalizations fell one by one as the days passed and no improvements are seen.
The only comprehensible explanation left is the one about lack of work. Idleness makes a person unable to concentrate. Or rather, they have no proper task at which to concentrate their energy. Because my blog posts never really have set deadlines for completion, they cannot act as something I focus on (I simply work on-and-off whenever I feel like it during the day). And because there are no productive tasks to focus on, I instead concentrate on the little supposed "illness" and physical discomfort I feel.
Too used to being busy, my mind seeks something to pay attention. No given any proper task to do so, it just wonders off, finding fault with anything that can potentially be the cause of why no proper tasks are given. I should commend my mind for being diligent at its job of staying focused, even if there is nothing to focus on. The result is frequent lapses of concentration, alternatively gaining and losing focus on each little thing that the mind wonders off to. The highly inconsistent, unnatural writing in recent blog posts is definitely a direct manifestation of such.
The only hope I have right now is that nearly a month of bumming at home does not cause my ability to focus to become lost. After landing at London, I certainly wish that I can pick up exactly where I left off in Korea, allowing myself to read on for more than 14 hours a day without any feeling of tiredness or boredom. "Maintaining high levels of diligence whenever the time calls for it" is definitely another one that I would like to add to my list of "new year resolutions"...
With that said, the new year will be a constant balancing act of "lets study hard" diligence and "lets be really social" self-confidence. Grades and networking matter equally in graduate school. But networking, beyond the few fun events among close friends, will often become a test of diligence, while continuing to be diligent under such unhappy situations also a test of self-confidence. It would be interesting to see how the two factors interact and evolve in the next year...
And being unproductive is not the worst thing. Even after landing in American soil for more than a week now, I am still having trouble staying up beyond 10pm at night, and almost promptly wake up at 7am everyday without alarms or noises. And during the day, the constant tiresomeness, characterized by pains in the eyes and headaches fading in and out, just would not go away. Even the daily exercises of writing the blog and reading the news are proving to be difficult at times. It is certainly fortunate that no academic work needs to be done right now.
The constantly sub-par physical conditions makes me wonder just how can such huge change be possible after working in Korea for literally every waking moment from 8am to midnight and dangerously entertaining myself in equally tight schedules when I am not working. After returning to San Diego, I cannot even imagine myself to be physically capable of such things just a few days ago.
In the few days, justifying the abnormal physical conditions were easy. Besides jet-lag, I can simply blame the conditions on caffeine withdrawal (certainly could not have survived work in Korea without those instant coffee sticks) and even because of the excess energy to adjust to the dry hot climate of San Diego and home-cooked food (I still think the drinking water here have a nasty salty after-taste). But the rationalizations fell one by one as the days passed and no improvements are seen.
The only comprehensible explanation left is the one about lack of work. Idleness makes a person unable to concentrate. Or rather, they have no proper task at which to concentrate their energy. Because my blog posts never really have set deadlines for completion, they cannot act as something I focus on (I simply work on-and-off whenever I feel like it during the day). And because there are no productive tasks to focus on, I instead concentrate on the little supposed "illness" and physical discomfort I feel.
Too used to being busy, my mind seeks something to pay attention. No given any proper task to do so, it just wonders off, finding fault with anything that can potentially be the cause of why no proper tasks are given. I should commend my mind for being diligent at its job of staying focused, even if there is nothing to focus on. The result is frequent lapses of concentration, alternatively gaining and losing focus on each little thing that the mind wonders off to. The highly inconsistent, unnatural writing in recent blog posts is definitely a direct manifestation of such.
The only hope I have right now is that nearly a month of bumming at home does not cause my ability to focus to become lost. After landing at London, I certainly wish that I can pick up exactly where I left off in Korea, allowing myself to read on for more than 14 hours a day without any feeling of tiredness or boredom. "Maintaining high levels of diligence whenever the time calls for it" is definitely another one that I would like to add to my list of "new year resolutions"...
With that said, the new year will be a constant balancing act of "lets study hard" diligence and "lets be really social" self-confidence. Grades and networking matter equally in graduate school. But networking, beyond the few fun events among close friends, will often become a test of diligence, while continuing to be diligent under such unhappy situations also a test of self-confidence. It would be interesting to see how the two factors interact and evolve in the next year...
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