birthday musings
It was my birthday today, and also “Guy Fawkes day” to some, where they either celebrate or pretend to burn the man who tried to blow up the English parliament a few hundred years back. I’m not much for birthday celebrations, so i tried to keep things quiet and have a couple people over so i could cook dinner for them. It seems to me that birthdays in north america have been turned into yet another consumer occasion. I’m more in favour of birthdays along the lines of that wonderful quote from Albert Einstein; “The value of a man [sic] resides in what he can give, not in what he receives.” So for my birthday tonight, i put my best effort into some food made from whole ingredients, with several contributions from my garden, along with the last remaining bottles of my home-made beer.
Since my birthday falls near the end of the year, it’s usually a time for me to reflect upon the year. For me, the value of the past year is in what i learned. This year i seemed to focus a lot on languages (again), and i feel that i really made progress in chinese in particular, and overall language and learning methods in general. I found that a lot of what applies to languages applies to other things as well, like music and math, or just about any topic of great depth. With learning as my metric for the value of the year, this year’s increase in my ability to learn was especially satisfying.
In the coming year, i hope to work on persistence and concentration, so as to push my multitude of half-ass hobbies to the next level of expertise, and to more efficiently gain some new ones. I think i’ve done well with mostly sticking to chinese over the past 6 months, and i plan to do that for at least the next 6 months. But i also want to work another easier language in there, between the cracks. For a native english speaker, German or Spanish takes about 1/4 the time to learn that chinese does, and i already have the basics down in both of those, so i might give one a shot. I’ve heard that “linguistic cross-training” can help you with both languages, but we’ll see. I’ll have plenty of time to hack on that over the winter while i wait for next year’s growing season to arrive.
Ride hard ride free