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Early to rise early to bed, makes a man healthy but socially dead

Today I folded the first 21 years of my life, years I can’t repeat or replay. I thank Allah for blessing me to live this long. Those first 21 years were upheavals.

It’s May 6, and I will be turning 21 in less than a month. I used to document at this time of the year, where I try as much as possible to reflect on the progress made this year, perhaps my learning process. Alhamdullah, I have learned a lot. And I have tales to tell, but hopefully, choosing the most significant one will find a wider audience and fit. I will talk in 3s three categories and 3 notes

Things I was wrong about Recently, I came to the realization: I’m not giving people what they deserve. I don’t make it easy for them to stay close to me, not only strangers, but even the people who care about me the most. I build walls, my mood is forever changing around them, and constantly not around. And I know this is wrong. I noticed that at the beginning of relationships, I can match people’s energy effortlessly, but over time I gradually drift back into being distant and cold.

I’m not sure if it exactly look as I imagine it

Zeinab

The first time I encountered this idea was when talking to Zeinab Sami 016 FMSI, while I insisted that she must study how stochastic processes are involved in machine learning, she responded with something that falls into the idea: “Your perception of this major might be different from reality.”

Lately, I lost my ability to focus and maintain a flow state. I don’t sleep late, I eat relatively healthy food, and I’m not dopamine addicted. The problem comes down to practices that would align your efforts with what you want to achieve. Today, and after 15 days of nonsensical hard work (definitely I learned, but I wasn’t comfortable learning), I get an hour with myself, having a lovely flow state, I will note and try to list all the things that I have done to get my focus back.

I once read:

 “one of the greatest tragedies in life is that you will always be loved more than you will ever know, someone in your class might find your presence inviting and warm even if you’ve exchanged a few words with them or maybe none at all, someone on the street loves your smile and it brightens their path for the next few blocks, someone who regularly comes to work is disappointed when you aren’t there, someone missed you today, someone noticed when you’re gone, someone loves you when you’re there, someone loves you when you’re nowhere to be found at all, you might think you have always disappeared when you’re no longer in the picture, but you never left the frame”

It was a rainy day when I realized that I was 19 years old, and I only had a few months left to turn 20. I’m no longer becoming a teenager, just like how John Green puts it, my 20s will go fast. My 30s will go faster than I can imagine, and suddenly I’m 40. You can’t let your mind stop thinking about the future or let the things from the past stop controlling you.

This is part of a series of notes I’m taking to understand the person I am when learning something. Most of them are about understanding myself and applying useful techniques.

Reading about neuroscience can help me save time instead of experimenting blindly and trying to see what works. But it feels almost too late, as I spent the first 19 years of my life learning how to learn. I never even signed up for the famous Coursera course on this topic. It was a lonely experimentation road.

I call this problem floating information. It is a literal translation of the Arabic word “طائفة”, which means floating in space without connection. I first noticed that there is information that is not linked to anything. It has no context, it solves no problem, and this kind of information is the hardest to keep in my mind. I forget it very easily.