Act!

My morning ritual begins with a coffee (after making my bed and doing some pull-ups). Having received a bag of coffee beans last month, I decided to buy a manual coffee grinder - a quality German-made stainless steel model with ceramic grinding teeth. It takes a lot of effort - 130 turns of the crank to get enough freshly ground coffee to fill my Bialetti coffee pot. But it's worth it. The taste is markedly superior to the stuff that comes ready ground. A bit like the difference in taste between buying ground pepper and grinding whole peppercorns fresh from a pepper mill.

So - having made my coffee, I'm finally sitting there enjoying it, staring out of the window, looking at the forest next door. As I do so, one word floats into my mind, out of nowhere. Like a feather floating down to go 'bang' as it lands:

ACT!

How should I interpret this? I, Dembinski, should take to the stage? "We do it wrong, being so majestical/To offer it the show of violence; For it is, as the air, invulnerable..." 

Or simply that I should just get on with it? Stop scrolling down Twitter, clean up the kitchen, go for a walk, think, write?

My biggest driver in life is my personal quest for understanding the nature of the Cosmos and our place in it; consciousness; purpose; spiritual evolution. Reading, listening, discussing - above all thinking. The longer I live, the greater is my understanding - hence my desire to live into a long and healthy old age. As with each of the last nine Januaries, the New Year has spurred physical activity; last week saw me do more of every set of seven exercises than I did the first week of 2022, so that's good.

TIME FOR SOME MORE PRESS-UPS!

Questions that are troubling me: Should I travel, like, go on holiday? I have become set in my ways - I've not had a proper two-weeks-off-fly-somewhere-style vacation since 2014. These days I feel increasingly guilty about my carbon footprint, especially when flying. Will visiting somewhere new elevate my life, bring me new insights into the human condition? 

If I have a calling, I believe it is to proselytise a simpler, slower, way of life, creating less pollution, being grateful for what we have rather than striving for continually more material possessions. For one's own psychological and spiritual good and for the good of the planet. This would mean I should reach out more with this message - communicating to more and more people; our technological age gives me far more tools and channels for this than ever.

My annual cycle has Lent as a pinnacle of activity, with daily blog posts of an entirely spiritual nature delivered daily for the past two years. Looking back over the lifetime of the blog, I can see how, over the years, my thinking has sharpened. Life is becoming clearer as I become more mature, wiser.

Still working after all these years?

I feel I have attained an optimal form of work. To quote the latest trend in HR - not so much work/life balance, but work/life blend. I'll take a couple of hours off for a walk during the working day, putting off work until the evening - or weekend. Summer holidays, as I wrote, I've not been taking. So I'm there in post doing what's needed during the quiet months of July and August.

Work comfortably, with people you like, in a job you like, at your pace. And keep on going way past retirement age. My father worked until four months shy of his 70th birthday to become a grandfather. And thereafter, lived another 26 years. 

Doing is better than not doing; doing too much is dangerous. Stress can kill. No stress leads to early death. Getting the balance right is crucial. Thanks to Moni for flagging this up in this excellent Guardian article. The key is in this sentence: "Research indicates that low-level stress from moderate exercise or work can enhance our cognitive and physical abilities in later life." Digging deeper: "Both mild-to-moderate physical and mental stress stimulate the production of chemicals in the blood called interleukins, activating the immune system and making it more able to fight off infections."

I sometimes find I'm asking myself who'll take over my job from me. I think the answer is becoming clearer - artificial intelligence (AI). Translation was but the start - these days, it wouldn't occur to me to translate anything from Polish into English from scratch - I'll just copy-paste into Google Translate or DeepL, and then work on editing the results of machine translation into something that reads like good English. Two months ago, we saw the launch of Open AI's Chat GPT. I've used it already for a business application (helping me write a recruitment ad) and can see that over time this is going to become as much as tool for business as is Google Search or Wikipedia. More on this in a forthcoming post.

Humanity is at a crossroads - as ever; I fear, however, that we are striding unthinkingly towards a dystopia at an accelerating pace. We can get this right - climate change, the AI revolution and the social changes it will unleash, and the worrying tendency of unhinged individuals to push the planet the wrong way. Yes, we all need to act - but first, we need to think.

This time last year:
The vicious circle of an ever-spreading city

This time two years ago:
New sewers, new estate

This time three years ago:

The ultra-rich - deserving, or not

This time seven years ago:
Globalisation and its part in PiS's return to power

This time eight years ago:
UK overtakes France as the world's fifth-largest economy

This time 12 years ago:
Wetlands winter meltdown

This time 13 years ago:
Winter's walk to work

This time 14 years ago:
Winter drivetime, Jeziorki North