For some reason, I’ve decided to attempt to resume my (previously) very sporadic blogging habits with yet another handle. I’m not sure where this is going but I think I’ll attempt to write more here regularly.

I have a yet another academic year to go. A yet another chance to try out a different permutation of the various knobs and dials that determine my behaviour. It’s the final year of my degree, and time after is something that feels so weird, so unpredictable as to signify the end of a lifetime. There’s only one year to get as much out of this life as possible and to prepare for the next one.

Nothing ever is that dramatic but the feeling is quite powerful, and as usual, relatively impervious to facts and inferences: I have to do everything worthwhile that I can in this time. But even with all the determination in the world, I probably couldn’t suddenly just start doing everything very differently; I can, however, hill-climb, one step at a time, towards something else.

One of these new things (among many, I hope), is dancing: at one point I had a revelation of sorts and found that I could actually dance somehow. Following the ‘revelation’, I went to some of the taster sessions of various dance societies in the university and, for now, decided to learn Salsa since it seemed to have the most potential for me to experience Flow (hence it seemed like the most fun out of the ones I tried).

Clearer than (ever?) before, my objectives for this year are: - use study time intelligently – I think I’m only capable of maybe 6 hours per day of serious studying so I should do that very regularly and evenly, on the problems that matter, -  meet more people, -  have fun, but also make it all really count.

“Having fun” would look somewhat paradoxical from the point of view of my past selves. The goal is happiness, which is not just a nice thing to have, but also (or maybe first of all) something that makes you work better in virtually every way. You can’t just trade-off happiness or exercise or sleep for greater productivity: that is the hard lesson that got drilled into me in the last few years.