Conscious living letter #9
Living by the seasons, staying connected, and navigating life, work, and AI.
Dear Conscious Reader,
It has been a while, and the summer holiday has come and gone.
Since moving across the Indian Ocean to Germany, this season always feels like an interlude. It is neither here nor there.
Should I slow down because it is the summer holidays—end of school, start of long breaks—and start anew in September? Even at work, everything slowed to a lull.
Then again, mid-year is when I usually gear up. It’s also my birthday, and I use this time to review my intentions—how I wish to spend my days, and with whom—and my aspirations.
Meanwhile, my son just started school—the excitement!—and it marks a new era in our family. And maybe, sometime next year, I will finally settle into this new seasonal rhythm the Europeans followed.
I come from Malaysia, where I tell people here cheekily, “It is always summer there”. This usually sparks envy, painting a dreamy picture of Malaysia. In truth, it’s hot, balmy, and the rains come often and hard. But they don’t need to know the details.
Gasp! How do people even live in accordance with phases and seasons? We don’t. After three decades in Malaysia, I devised my own.
The year starts with our contemporary calendar year, and it will only truly begin after we celebrate the Chinese New Year. Then, I conduct a mid-year check-in with myself on my birthday, and from then on, it’s a home run until the end of the year.
Here, summer asks me to do two opposite things: pause for rest, but also reflect and gear up for what’s ahead. No wonder I feel a little dissonance.
In the future, I will defer my reflections and plans until after the summer break. In this way, the Chinese New Year may well reflect a better start to the year.
Do you think the Chinese know when the real New Year is? Is the Lunisolar calendar more aligned with the seasons? Possibly.
So yeah, that is my long way of saying that I am back! Did I have a good break? I did. There have been good shifts at work, too, though they’ve taken much of my mental energy.
However, I am now ready to write again, and I have a series coming up. I hope you will enjoy it.
For those in the northern hemisphere, I hope summer has treated you kindly; for those in the south, may winter have been cozy; and for my fellow Asians at the equator, let me remind you—it’s well past mid-year, and time for some internal seasonal change!
So wherever you are in the world, I hope this season brings you your own kind of renewal.
Consciously yours,
Rachel
As always, I'd like to share some thoughts from my reading and reflection space—ideas that have resonated with me recently.
For conscious living
AI and life
I cannot resist writing about AI again. Everybody is talking about AI. This was my response to
recently about how he uses ChatGPT and how it is dividing the creative world.I find it interesting how reluctant artists are to this new technology. Since I work in tech, I utilize AI extensively in almost everything. I have yet to hear a programmer complain that a program is no longer beautiful or meaningful because it was made with the help of AI.
Until we have an AI that can think for itself, everything will still be driven by humans. There will still be a soul behind it.
Fellow Malaysian
said that AI has helped refuel her energy to write fiction, and she shared this, knowing she will face backlash.
Connecting with family and friends
Recently, I felt a keen disconnection from my friends from abroad. I noticed that talking to people who have known you for a long time is different from talking to people who have just met you. Or maybe I was just slow in deepening friendships, and time was my ally.
So I started making more one-on-one calls with friends whenever possible. With so many of these meetings at work nowadays, it makes sense to have some with family and friends as well.
What do you all think?
For sharing
How to prove you were born four decades ago in Bangladesh
Once I read the title of this essay from one of my favourite writers on Substack,
, I went “oh-oh,”.This is because I had my fair share of dealing with bureaucracy in Germany—the absurdity of trying to prove something you know inherently to be true, and the need for an arbitrary person to approve it to make it true. Not to give any spoilers, read it and find out what happened!
On the side, Istiaq might have also planted a seed in my head about having a sabbatical before my kids turn teenagers and want nothing to do with us anymore. Malaysia, of course, comes to mind….
Why can’t we have a four-day work week?
Thanks to
for bringing up this topic, which had been on my mind even before COVID-19 came along and halted the world in its frantic pursuit of progress and consumerism.But as predicted, the world went back into its usual spinning immediately, though with a change. Now, fully remote, hybrid, or flextime work arrangements are the norm. We will no longer settle for anything less in our jobs.
What would it take to finally nudge everyone into a four-day work week? Because, let’s face it, besides the service or the production industry, we all can do our job in four days easily.
Fewer coffee breaks, less brain-recuperating during office hours, or sneaking in errands and doctor appointments because we have more time in the week to rest, connect, and put our personal lives in order.
Would you embrace a four-day work week?
You might have missed this since our last letter:
The magic of literature
Words have wielded immense power since time immemorial—to communicate, to convince, to spread ideas, to change minds, or even to create new ideologies. We are all aware of the profound influence that holy books have in various religions.
How a little bird taught me to love and let go
I used to think that grief was only for those who face death, having something precious ripped from their hands with finality. I hadn’t learned that it can happen so gradually, even with the living, creeping in with slight changes or shifts of needs and perspectives, that you don’t sense the loss until it’s gone, staring at your empty hands.
Thank you for staying with me during my absence and for reading all the way through. If you’re excited about my upcoming series on conscious living, I’d be so grateful if you hit the button to subscribe—or even upgrade—to support this work. It helps me justify the time I pour into writing here, and keeps this space alive.