Mental bloatware and the remedy
Image by Andreas Wohlfahrt from Pixabay
It is a good idea to completely wipe your computer occasionally, because it tends to clog up with all kinds of bloatware with time no matter how good care you take of it. And after a complete format and reinstall, everything feels 10X snappier. I think our mind has some similarities with this principle. I’m not that old yet, but I am starting to see a pattern in my own life history when my mind became so full of “bloatware” that the best way to sort it out was a reinstall of the “operating system”. In the case of the mind, that could mean a long vacation and/or change in environment so that the mental flywheel of the mind can come to a complete stop (it takes a lot of time). Only then can you give it a proper service and grease the bearings.
I think I am at one of those points in my life again now. The last time was back in 2018 when I got a puppy Labrador and eight weeks of continuous vacation to train that little guy. It was like ending a chapter in life and starting a new one. The four years before that, I had gone through a long period of illness, personal crisis and defended a PhD thesis at the same time, so I was quite exhausted. And the same pattern happened in 2014, when I went on a motorcycle journey to India, Nepal and Tibet preceded by four years of steadily increasing mental bloatware. How interesting, it seems like a pattern of four-year cycles is emerging here. Each cycle starts out fresh and highly motivated and gets continuously worse with time, just as the steady decline of a fresh reinstalled computer. In the crescendo towards the end, I usually am about to throw up just by thinking about the current situation looking for a way out and find another job. I.e., not a reinstallation of the operating system, but more like a switch to a completely different OS.
This time, however, is different. Because this time I am going back to the exact same place, and I look forward to it - for the first time! Even if I sometimes during the spring of 2022 almost broke myself, for example when I got up at 3:30 in the morning to start working, skipping the lunch break, and continuing until 17:30 only to start over with the same thing next day. Such a situation does not constitute a life. It is slowly grinding yourself to pieces, while damaging all your relations as a bonus. However, as long as you have a why, you can take almost anything the world throws at you. Without the why, I would have been in hospital long ago.
But now it is time to reinstall the operating system. And this time will be the best one ever, because I am going on parental leave for the first time. Seven weeks to focus on being a dad and just being there with my boys, it’s almost too good to be true. The normal vacation of three weeks is too short to get a proper cool-down of the mind. The aforementioned mental flywheel will keep spinning for a long time. And just like in physics, the more energy you put into the flywheel, the longer it will keep spinning. In my case, I have been giving it everything I got for four years straight, so that’s a guarantee that three weeks wouldn’t have been nearly enough. I really felt it today. I felt extremely tired. A feeling of complete fatigue. But it was a nice feeling. It felt as if I had earned it. I had the same feeling every time when I had finished an exam in the university. The pressure was released, and a very good feeling settled. This is exactly the same feeling, but on a much grander scale. Now, I look forward to august 2022, when I can start putting more energy into my mental flywheel once again. I am confident that this little break will put things into the correct perspective. Sometimes you just need to let some time pass, to see things clearly.
Children simply make life much, much easier.