Hey!

Welcome back to another week of musings. I hope you had an uneventful weekend! We went to see the KAWS: Family exhibition at the San Francisco MoMA.

This week is Thanksgiving here in the US. We'll probably spend it at home, but we're always up for Friendsgiving.

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Things I enjoyed in the past week

• The song "Beto's Horns" by Fred again..., CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso has been on repeat in my head since its release.

• This lifestyle vlog of someone who lives in a place so north that they have Polar Night, basically no sun for a few months.

• Revisiting Manager READMEs by Camille Fournier is a good read on alternative strategies to READMEs.

• Cloudflare Global Outage Traced to Internal Database Change. Unless you don't use the internet regularly, you might have noticed that your favorite sites were down for a while due to Cloudflare's outage.

This post is mainly for myself. I always have a hard time requesting time off or planning vacations, etc. It stresses me out being unproductive.

Over time, I've come to realize that this is wrong, and while I haven't requested many vacation days this year, I've become better at recognizing when I need to rest. And while a few months of this year, my idea of rest was staying home in bed and not moving, I've become more aware of the different types of rest.

It feels odd, especially given the current discourse of 9-9-6 or even 0-0-7 in my surroundings.

Rest is one of the leading enablers of peak performance* in sports, and we also talk about doing nothing as acts of resistance*.

Regardless of what you think of work*, I think it's vital to rest appropriately in all aspects of life.

Recently, I discovered that just resting in bed, doomscrolling was only physical rest, and most of the time, I needed a mental rest. There are mainly seven types of rest: physical, mental, sensory, emotional, social, creative, and spiritual. I've been trying some of these in the second half of the year.

For example, limiting my phone screen time (mental rest), or journaling when feeling overwhelmed (mental/emotional rest).

What I've noticed is that I need a hobby that lets me disengage. I tried reading, but I feel I'm actively reading, like it's taking my energy and focus to be able to read. In an attempt to disengage from the world, I've been walking daily, listening to nothing, just letting the sounds of the environment surround me. It can be overwhelming due to the noise and cacophony of street life.

Sometimes at the end of the workday, I've had this internal monologue: should I keep going for one more hour, or go for a walk and come back to work for an hour?

I've talked with peers and mentors, and the ones who are also parents don't have these conversations; the family takes priority over work, so they have hard stops most of the time without having an inner monologue.

Your turn!

How do you rest? How do you know it's time to rest, or what type of rest you need? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!

Happy coding!