Took the day off against my will, and thankful for it
I’ve been quite productive this month, chief of which has entailed publishing a spree of long articles. Notably, all of these pieces have been on different topics, each concerning an unusually important development in its own niche within the space industry. Because of their very newsy nature, it wasn’t possible to not write about them. Such is the nature of journalism. And I wasn’t content with writing about them the way it was already covered either. And so I ended up with concerted back-to-back efforts in publishing my analysis and commentary on NASA’s abysmal budget proposal, India’s PSLV rocket’s failure, ispace Japan’s crash landing, and China’s growing lead in lunar orbital infrastructure.
Today I woke up, freshened up, and began the work day like I would usually. But I just couldn’t get meaningful thoughts to exist, much less flow. Giving the brain more time and trying to catalyze the process with good reads or music did not work either. Every end was dead. Clearly, the streak of articles had taken their toll at last. One of the few perks I do get as an independent writer is to be my own boss. I don’t use that privilege loosely, and much prefer to set scheduled tasks for each day of the work week. But today my mind was just frozen. There weren’t any immediate self-imposed deadlines, and so after some initial reluctance, I decided to just let it be and called off the work day.
I slept through the afternoon, then walked in the park, had a nice butter vada pav, did some physical and digital chores, and then read a bit on my Kindle over a big cup of chai (tea). One of those reads was about the fascinating problem of character amnesia in China. Allow me to quote the very first para which will make you click with intrigue:
During a visit to Beijing many years ago, I was having lunch with three PhD students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all of whom were native speakers of Chinese. I happened to have a cold that day and was trying to write a brief note to a friend to cancel an appointment that afternoon. I found that I could not recall how to write the Chinese characters for the word ‘sneeze’. I asked my three friends to write the characters for me and, to my surprise, all three simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the characters.
I end the day writing this blog post, which has brought back my fluid thoughts. And now I can sleep in peace. And, maybe this post provided you some perspective for when you find yourself in a similar situation?