By Kimine Mayuzumi At Being Lazy and Slowing Down, we often talk about creating space – for rest, for reflection, for remembering what matters. But what happens when the world feels anything but spacious? When news headlines feel like they’re closing in, and being informed feels necessary but overwhelming? This post grew out of a question someone asked during a recent webinar that I was delivering. It stopped me in my tracks… and felt important…
By Kimine Mayuzumi Life transitions are inevitable in human life. They may include career shifts, relocation for work and/or living, major changes of physical/mental status, loss of income, and loss of a relationship or a family member. Because of the pandemic and what it brought, it may be accurate to say that everyone experienced some level of transition recently. We were forced to adapt to the situation and learn a completely new way of living…
By Riyad A. Shahjahan I love writing conceptual pieces. Such pieces help surface the questions or disconnections I feel as I am impacted by real events in the world. It’s like cooking my favorite dishes and tasting the distillation of flavors after a long arduous process. Yet, the process is always messy and tends to be a journey plagued with inadequacy. “Persuading an octopus in a jar” (p. 181) emerged as one powerful image in…
By Kimine Mayuzumi While the whole world has slowed down, the guilty feeling of many academics hasn’t – could be quite an opposite. It is partly because even the adjustment made for the evaluation system for tenure and promotion doesn’t seem to be promising at this point. The society is quite unsettling. The gap between who can produce and who can’t has been exacerbated. The latter group would feel agitated, anxious, and scarce within themselves…
By Kimine Mayuzumi Fear Fear has always been an essential companion to our lives. It tries to defend us from given threats. Fear caused by a traumatic event brings us the energy stored for emergencies to the front and creates our hyperarousal state so that we can quickly deal with the event or minimize our risks. So there is nothing wrong with holding onto fear. What I learned and tried to practice in the pre-pandemic…
