Note #63: “Allow yourself morning”

Drama, dogma, danger, death

What’s up?

I’ve had some website drama.

My web-hosting provider was doing an update and I hadn’t realised it until too late. My usual writing app, Ulysses, which supports publish directly to Wordpress and Medium—but yesterday it just kept returning an error message every time I hit “Publish”. Then I tried logging into Wordpress directly, which was fine but when I hit “New Post” I was back in an error screen!

I finally figured out what was going on: my provider had sent a message about upgrading their DNS backend and I’d seen that but failed to clock that it was yesterday. And here we are!

I was worried for a bit there, but although it turned out to be no big deal, it was a reminder of how much this means to me that I get to send you these emails, and that you read and reply to them. That means so very much!

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Strong versus hard (essay)

This week, I wrote about being how we handle being unable to perform at top form. It’s funny, isn’t it, how often we don’t want to admit it, and we act like we have to be “strong” which in practice often means something along the lines of refusing to accept that we need help. Sound familiar?

Then have I got an essay for you, and here’s the opening:

What do you do when you’re unable to do enough?

This question came up recently on one of my WhatsApp groups. We were talking recently about Apple Watch goals and how to handle them when you fell sick, and I shared a tweet of someone saying they would reduce their goals. Someone responded that it would feel like cheating to do that, which initially surprised me. Then I remembered it was just another example of a phenomenon I see every week at work, and very often in some of my favourite people.

Too often, we demand the most of ourselves right when we’re at our worst.

You can read the rest of the essay here: In sickness and in health

Dogma and danger (quote)

Apple TV is releasing a TV adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and I’m super excited because Asimov has meant a lot to me since I first read his books in secondary school. I haven’t seen it yet (saving it for this weekend), but I’ve already heard high praise from those who have. In honour of the release, this week’s quote comes from that book.

Sick (Yoruba proverb)

If we fussed as much over the sick as we did when they died, they might have lived.

The proverb speaks to sickness, but it applies just as much to systems: when things go catastrophically wrong there’s often a lot of furore by the same people who choose to ignore the early warning signs. We’re seeing a lot of that in our world today, aren’t we?

Talk soon,

Doc Ayomide

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