An untidy environment may appear fine to you on an everyday level, but you may not realise that it likely gets in the way of further development.
Cleaning that mess out of the way could notch you up to a higher gear and take you into a more confident realm. Even if you don’t care about mess, or if you think you have an ‘ordered mess’, the mental difference is shocking.
Yes, so I have a son.
While you rarely see many mums and dads on a university campus in the UK, it’s apparently quite a common sight in Iceland:
“…in Iceland, even at the business-oriented Reykjavik University, it is not only common to see pregnant girls in the student cafeteria, you see them breast-feeding, too. ‘You extend your studies by a year, so what?’ said Oddny. ‘No way do you think when you have a kid at 22, “Oh my God, my life is over!” Definitely not! It is considered stupid here to wait till 38 to have a child. We think it’s healthy to have lots of kids. All babies are welcome.'” – From The Observer Magazine, May 18th 2008
Anyway, I wanted to impart some of my findings over the last couple of weeks in which I have been a father.
It’s funny how much goodness you can take away from a tiny little human being that isn’t able to do much yet:
1. Focus Focus Focus – A baby doesn’t know what is going on when it is first born. The child could hit itself on the head with their arm, but they haven’t got any concept that it was their own arm. Or their head, for that matter.
Yet despite this lack of self, babies love to look around and see the bold shapes around them, the light and dark. They like to hear new noises, as well as familiar ones, like Mum’s voice.
Babies focus so intently that they put us adults to shame. All a newborn can see is a haze of shapes, simple colours and light. It’s a confusion of newness. Yet they take every last drop of information in with such deliberate regard that it should make every one of us consider just how much we are focusing on our goals ourselves.
It’s been a while. My apologies for not putting up a note of explanation.
My wife was pregnant and went into labour a week early, so everything stopped for that (obviously!). I’ve barely been at the computer since.
After about 26 hours of labour, my wife gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. I am now a daddy. Rowan was born (eventually) on 7 May 2008, weighing 6lbs7oz.
Of the 26 hours labour, I think only 20 minutes were officially classified as ‘labour’…my wife’s intense pain apparently didn’t make it official, although she would definitely argue that point!
I had a LOT of catching up to do on the Internet, blogging, higher ed, reading, etc, over this weekend. Weeks of backlog compressed into a short space of time. Fortunately, I’m nearly back up to speed. And I’ve even written a related post for the blog about the things I’ve learned from my newborn son. That’s coming right up.
Obviously the next few weeks are going to be interesting, opening another new chapter of my life. Exciting stuff! For the blog, I’ve got lots of short pieces written, so I hope to be right back to the posting, whatever gets thrown at me (virtually, as well as literally!) over the weeks.
Hello again!
Today has been fun. I was rushing about from one person to the next, attempting to set up an urgent meeting between extremely busy people.
I wouldn’t usually consider that as fun. And it wasn’t easy, but – with a little help from my friends – I did it.
This was only one of my tasks for the day. The backwards and forwards was taking place at speed, causing change every few minutes. Despite that, I still had to complete my daily tasks and respond to new jobs, phone calls, and so on, as the day went on.
Still doesn’t sound much fun, eh? But as I walked back up the stairs for about the millionth time (give or take a few…), it became apparent to me that I felt serene; I was calm; I was happy. Yet this peace was coming through my sense of urgency and it even helped boost my productivity. When I stopped for a moment to assess how much I had achieved in the day so far, I realised that many other tasks had been completed that I would usually expect to take longer. And this all happened while I was busy with a more pressing task.
TheUniversityBlog 