Best Posts of 2015

Productivity to Leave Productivity

Procrastination Chronicles #9:  Dishes, Always Dishes

Procrastination Chronicles #10: Reading Walden (with an new Update)

My Walden Years

How to have a Perfect Day (For Me)

Go Into the Silence

Another Take on Beating Procrastination

Dvorak

An Unspeakable Dream
Get the Dao Where I Can

Obituary for My Father

The Playlist at My Father's Funeral

Eulogy for My Uncle

The activity of filtering through my posts this year to make this list has been deeply meaningful for me.  It's a shame that I end on the notes of these deaths, but they were, after all the biggest developments of this year.

It was also the year of Thoreau, as well as putting down to paper the deeply spiritual value of silence, stillness, and a connection to nature.  I learned to use productivity to leave productivity.

And for good measure I had fun starting and failing at a lot of other little projects (those posts didn't make this cut) , but I did end up learning Dvorak typing.

Update -- December 2015

Merry Winter Solstice!.

Spirit

I am going back through my journals and creating an index so far for them.  This has also led me to see some patterns and connections which I had not noticed before.  I now believe that journals are the best catalyst I can think of for adding -- or really pulling up -- meaning in life.

A word on my journals.  I keep three paper journals, all three in the same style of cheap composition book.  One journal is at home, one is at work, and one is in my back-pack for when I travel or go on walks.  The travel journal is the most widely used, but the other two have gems of their own.

I am deliberately forcing myself to hold off on writing (or at the very least publishing) until I reach my summer vacation.  I want to incubate my ideas and, besides from these updates, only deliver the best, truest pieces of writing that I can produce.


Mind

My project for the break was porting over the historical dates I had in Memrise over to Anki.  I just like Anki much, much better.  I have dropped the game of Diplomacy and have made my morning mental wake up routine consist of doing my spaced repetition work with Anki.

Body

Still greasing the groove with modified push-ups.

On the days I am healing up from that, I still hang from my pull up bar to work on grip strength, and others I work on single leg squats -- not pistols, but single leg squats with my off leg tucked back.

Lastly, I am trying to replace the push that coffee gives me (or so I think) with 50 reps of cardio, like jumping jacks or side-to-side jumps.  I had read about it before, and am now trying it out.  In the long run I want to be off caffeine entirely.  For now, I will drink some in the mornings to avoid headaches.

Eulogy for my uncle

I have been doing too many of these lately.

With my uncle's passing, I am now the last living Huddleston male.

Here is the eulogy:


With my uncle's passing I now have some big shoes to fill. In a world that seems obsessed with words, flash, PR, and brands, I learned from my grandfather, father, and uncle the meaning of loyalty, the gifts of service, and most of all deep roots.  I remember being well into my twenties before I realized how abnormal it has become for a family to see each other as much as mine.  You mean you don't visit you grandparents every week?

On my weekly visits to my grandparents, often Ray and his wife Connie would come by, or even be there before us. This was never planned.  Sunday is just a good visiting day.  And, for the record, my mom and dad made their visits so dang early on Sundays that I rarely ran into them.

Does this sound simple?  Fine, it is. But as the personal development guru Jim Rohn shows, if something is easy to do, it is also easy to not do.  There are hundreds of other priorities and clever reasons to not make time for your family.  That has not been the Huddleston way.  It was not uncle Bipper's way.

As a teacher it's a pity that one lesson I cannot truly teach my students is how to get matters of loyalty and love right.  But you have to have good examples.  And you have to have good kin folk.

In little over a year this family has had more loss than what most families experiences in a decade, and the world has lost three great men.