This week I accepted a short editing assignment for a multilateral organisation. I’ve long been in this organisation’s editing pool, but I gave up accepting their intermittent assignments offers when I got busy with other stuff, and I also couldn’t bear wading through any more dense copy about agrarian reform in China/technical assistance for ESCOs/capacity building on operational knowledge in Cambodia’s road sector (fictional examples…) If I was editing this, by the way, I would spell out ESCO in the first instance, but I’m not, so I’m gonna leave you guessing.
So I settled in to re-familiarise myself with their style guide and got cracking. And even though I know probably not even the authors’ parents are going to read this text, I have loved settling back into that space of parsing inscrutable sentences, reorganising abbreviation lists (deleting those that don’t appear a minimum of three times in the text), getting rid of double spaces after full stops and deleting superfluous words. The footnotes are such a mess that I can’t believe anyone wanting to maintain a reputation in their field would have submitted this text, but hey, I guess they guess it’s my job to tidy them up. While I am going to be panicking tomorrow to finish it all by deadline, I still get a curious satisfaction to italicising publication names, punctuating citations correctly and cross-referencing repetitive footnotes.
I don’t want to do this for eight hours a day. I don’t want to teach yoga for eight hours a day, either (three or four would be about right, I reckon). Falling back into editing made me realise that for some of us—if we aren’t in a profession requiring total commitment, or an economic situation that dictates otherwise—it’s immensely satisfying to switch between very different jobs. Or that different jobs can be very satisfying.
Maybe thinking in terms of “jobs” is the wrong approach. Maybe we just need to fill our time with different activities, paid or unpaid, and we can find more than one thing satisfying. And if we’re feeling in a rut, it’s time to give something different a shot (like these broke artists during quarantine in Mexico). We shouldn’t expect to be completely satisfied by one occupation, in the broadest sense of the word.
Spinning a tangent off this train of thought, this is a lovely piece on how we find different satisfactions out of different relationships, and how society has come to (over)value romantic relationships at the expense of friendships. Though this piece is on singular intimate platonic friendships, it nevertheless reminds me of an Anais Nin quote I love: “Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”
And what does all this have to do with practising yoga? Consistently doing a particular practice is a given. But if your routine is fixed to the point of feeling a little bored, maybe shaking it up by just trying a different style for fun, practising at a different time of day, taking it easy during class rather than pushing it, or trying a new teacher might allow a fresh perspective and inform your particular practice in a way that’s complementary and satisfying. We don’t have to have all our many needs met through one job/person/practice.
Having said that—it occurred to me that all Jiwa’s Bikram classes are online, and the first class is free, so if you’re in the right time zone, feel free to jump onto Zoom and join a class! Here’s this week’s schedule:
(https://zoom.us/j/9836792592?pwd=U2U3aWtrQ2t4YmZ0V1puZ0dRU1JIUT09 / Meeting ID: 983 679 2592 / Password: jiwa.)
Watching
My Octopus Teacher is lovely. A reminder that we are nature.
My first mobile phone was a Motorola flip. I still miss snapping it shut at the end of a call:
Reading
Rodham by Curtis Sittenfeld. It’s so good, and I completely disagree with this lukewarm NYT review. I loved Prep, too, and I still think of American Wife when I drive through intersections, wondering how life might change if I had a collision, or who I might collide with.