Month: December 2017

So it’s always nice to sit down with my wife and reflect on our last year, and we do a setup of (1) What we accomplished in the last year, (2) What we wanted to accomplished, but didn’t in the last year, and (3) What we wish to accomplish in the New Year.  I was slightly dreading the exercise this year since I generally feel it hasn’t been a good year, but in hindsight I am actually much happier about the year.  It’s a nice feeling.  We tend to be a bit biased in only thinking about what has happened in the last weeks or months, but in reality a year is a long time and there are many accomplishments forgotten.  Both big and small.  For instance, I finally published a high-impact paper that I had been working on for years, and I’d forgotten all about it on a daily basis.  One of the smaller things is just taking the time to begin small projects such as blogging or I’ve dabbled in a bit of RPG Maker as a fun little outlet.  These haven’t taken much time, but demonstrate big steps towards personal growth and moving forward.  I love my wife and I’m glad we’ve been there for each other through the year, even if it is hard at times.  So, here’s to 2018, a year of financial stability and new career paths for me!  Stay tuned for positive updates =)

The meaning of the Holidays has changed over the years.  As a kid it was about presents and moving forward.  In my grad student years, it was about catching up on work and having time to travel.  Now, it’s an opportunity to take a break, look back, and reflect.

It’s quite odd how a year both goes very fast and slow, how it seems not much has happened but it always amazes me what activities I’ve forgotten over the year and how much growth has occurred.  Making my New Years list with my wife is something I look forward to, it’s a chance to reassess the goals that were important and not so important from the last year, which ones to be proud of and which ones deserve a second shot.

A healthy wealthy journey is much easier in a facilitating environment, than a disabling environment.  Most people don’t give enough credit to how environmental factors influence their work and life, but it will make or break you.  Environmental influences include anything external to your own decision making that influences your decisions, such as top-down government regulations, family rules, poor work place/societal culture, and any other number of external circumstances that makes it more difficult to accomplish your goals.  A lot of of these circumstances are associated with privilege and it is one of the hardest things to admit you have, and an easy thing to realize you don’t have.  Part of a healthy wealthy journey is realizing that these environmental factors and privileges effect everyone in a different way and part of overcoming them is accepting them while slowly making changes and decisions that help change the circumstances to your favor.

So, with sad news at the end of the week right before my usual time to update, I had a notification to call my wife’s parents as soon as possible and found that her sister’s journey had come to an end by her own hand.  I processed for a moment, than delivered the news to my wife.  We had two to three days of upset chaos in getting ourselves and dog on a plane to the States as soon as possible while not completely blowing off everyone in Zurich, but finding many plans and obligations suddenly cancelled.  To my understanding, the journey’s end was a result of a gun, drinking, and impulsiveness, and there’s only speculation as far as the real reasons or rationale behind it which is not a discussion for here.  My thoughts on it here are that everyone was too focused on their own lives (me included), and this was the resulting casualty.  It is very important to recognize that a healthy journey is not completed alone, and does not result in the end of another’s.  I can only hope my journey in the future leads to impacting more people positively and to someday fully visit the idea of empathy engineering and spread it to others.  It’s hard though, because these idealistic and hopeful endeavors are not the ones that are not support from the top and from the bottom people do not like change.  It’s with a heavy heart I continue my journey along the path of Western civilization while at the same time trying to improve the system from the inside.