Hey, it only took three weeks this time! I’ve been working quite hard, mostly programming (oh hi there C++, I never really stopped loving you. I really like what you’ve done with the autos and the lambdas), taking care of some admin (freeagent is approximately an infinite times better for running your business in South Africa than Sage One Accounting / Pastel My Business Online, which is a textbook example of how to torture your users with an almost hilariously terrible user interface which would have been funny were it not for the fact that it is so excruciatingly painful), gearing up for open source activism (if you’re in SA and you’re into open source, please join!) and spending as much as possible free time in the beautiful surroundings.
I made you this photo sphere of the waterfall at the top of the Leopard’s Kloof trail in the Harold Porter botanical gardens, one of our favourite outdoor hangouts:
This past weekend we had the privilege of going to a weekend-long double birthday party in a place called Boggomsbaai. The subjects of said party (I didn’t want to objectify them) are two of the most interesting people I know. In spite of this foreknowledge, I was still greatly (but extremely pleasantly) surprised by the number of exceptionally interesting friends that aforementioned party subjects had managed to surround themselves with, resulting in an ever-so-slightly mind-bending gathering.
Of the many things I learnt this weekend, I would like to share these two with you:
Lesson 1 – Weekend parties are the best parties.
… we should do even more of those! It seems like the Friday warm-up-party and the Saturday morning and afternoon socialising and more warm-up, combined with a willing group of party athletes, are good ingredients for a Saturday night awesomeness crescendo! (live band and copious amounts of beer not bad ideas either)
Lesson 2 – On being grateful.
At one point I was chatting with one of the guests, a person who has done quite a bit of travelling, and who seems to have settled nicely into the role of eternal foreigner here in this strange country. Their better living tip, based on much hard-won experience, was simply this: Be grateful.
Their advice immediately made a great impression on me.
Remembering to be explicitly grateful every day (go on, identify and articulate all of the things! if you are able to read this, chances are that you have much to be grateful for) is such an elegant yet practical path to mindfulness. To boot, it fits in very nicely with being kind.
(During looking up the etymology of “to boot” on this worldwide network that interactively gives us access to just about the sum total of human knowledge whenever we want it, I just discovered that “botha” is a Gothic word meaning “advantage”. Sweet!)