2-D

Reading back on my time in Africa, I realize how lame my blog has become. Any and all insight I have now is related solely to my emotional state (or at least 99% of it), and that's just boring. I have new experiences here in Hawaii, for sure, but they aren't as interesting, or heavy, or so totally foreign to me as to seem worthy of writing about.

This may be why I read so much more when I'm in the States than when I'm abroad. And maybe why I read so much non-fiction. If there's anything that has become apparent to me, it's that I feel like life has come to an abrupt halt when I'm not learning new things. It's easy to constantly be learning in a new environment. But when my days mostly consist of office, physical activity, and dinner with friends, I don't feel the learning curve nearly as steeply.

I've maxed out at work. Not sure what new things I can learn there (things that would be interesting for me to learn, that is), so that's a major problem, since I spend a majority of my day there. I downloaded R (an open source statistical analysis package) yesterday just to stimulate and challenge my mind. I have no reason to be using it, but I needed to spark the brain.

But what I'm understanding is that I like to learn new things in conjunction with other people. By this, I mean, I like to learn about culture and how culture impacts everything from dating relationships to the way people learn chemistry. So yeah, I can sit in my office and teach myself some crazy new programming language, but where is the connection to anything tangible?

In Lesotho, everything was always tangible. I was living in the belly of the beast. I was constantly learning and linking that learning to the grand philosophy of which I like to write.

I've decided it's my own fault for being unstimulated right now. I have to make more of an effort to "dig in", as I like to say. Complacency could easily be the death of me. I guess the issue is that I get lazy or stuck in routine, and then I don't seek out stimulation as much as I should. But then it comes to a head, like now, and the fire is burning my butt and making me move toward what I know I really want to be doing.

I've been living in two dimensions lately. Time to add the third.