Self-Reflection #1

Hi everyone! I hope everyone is doing well during this time. Here is my self-reflection on what I’ve been doing to keep myself healthy and happy and to help others as well.

1.) What is something you did for your body? 

 One thing that I have done for my body these past couple of weeks is doing a kettlebell workout every other day. This includes doing get-ups, swings, clean and presses, snatches, and squats, all using one single kettlebell. It’s a good workout because it works out various different muscles, it only takes about 15 minutes to do, and I feel a lot more refreshed after doing this workout. 

Another thing I have been doing for my body is going out for daily walks. Lately, I’ve been trying to get outside once a day so I can see the sun and move and stretch my legs. There is a specific loop that I like to walk around in my neighbourhood that takes about 30 minutes to walk around, and it has a lot of uphill parts near the end so it actually gets the heart rate up a fair bit and even gets me sweating some in the warm, sunny weather. 

2.) What is something you did for your mind? 

 Something that I did for my mind is meditation. This isn’t something I normally do at home because I would simply do this once a week when we did it at Kempo (a Japanese martial arts class). However, I obviously can’t go to classes anymore. With doing homework for online school and being stuck inside my apartment for so many hours each day, I figured doing mediation would be a good way to clear my mind and make me feel more relaxed. Even just sitting there for a couple minutes, back straight and taking deep, controlled breaths, helps relax my mind a lot. 

Another thing I have been doing for my mind is reading. I’ve been reading ordinary English novels as well as reading a French philosophy book for my French class. It’s called “Presentations de la Philosophie” by Andre Comte-Sponville. I recently finished reading the chapter on liberty, and it really had me pondering what it truly means to be free, and the paradoxes involved with liberty. One part I found rather interesting was the fact that we typically think that laws take away our freedom, but in reality, if there were no laws, our freedom to live without violence, for example, may be taken away from us. Furthermore, it has me wondering if we can truly control our “wants” and opinions and views… am I my brain, or does my brain control me?

3.) What is something you did for your happiness? 

One thing that I did for my happiness last week is go out for a walk with a friend of mine. I hadn’t seen any of my friends in person since spring break started, but since she lives just down the street a little ways, we decided to go on a walk around the neighbourhood together, while still practicing physical distancing. It was a good opportunity for us to get outside in the sun and just to talk and catch up with each other, as it just isn’t quite the same over text. 

Another thing I did for my happiness is have a video chat between my immediate family, my younger cousins’ family, and our grandparents. We normally would spend Easter together as a big family, but since we obviously couldn’t do that this year, we organized a time to have supper and eat “together” over a video chat. Then, after we were done eating, we played Drawful 2 together, and then we held our family photo contest that we have been doing for the past few years whenever we get together. Basically, we have a certain time frame for when our photos can be taken, and we can submit 1-2 photos per category (the categories this time were Nature, Social Distancing, Life, Technology, Breaking the Rules, Flattening the Curve, and Anything Goes). My uncle set up an online submission and voting system, and we all looked at the photos through the video chat together and then voted on our personal devices. This was a great way to connect with my extended family, and I found it really fun. 

4.) What is something you did for someone else? 

Something I did for someone else (well, multiple people technically) was help out at the veterinary clinic that my mom works at. Unlike most businesses nowadays, things have been pretty hectic there sometimes, so it’s been nice to be able to lend a hand and help them out with things like cleaning kennels, dishes, laundry, and holding cats and dogs still while they work on them when things are busy. 

Another thing that I did for someone else is helping out my dad with figuring out what to do for his physics classes. He’s a college lab tech, and now that he can’t teach physics labs in person, he has to figure out ways to still teach and grade them. He’s fairly good with technology, but he still wanted a few pointers from me as to what sorts of technology I use for handing things in for school and what would work best for his purposes (he wants to give them a lab that’s already been “done”, and have them do the calculations with those numbers and the discussion, etc). I told him about taking pictures of handwritten homework with OneDrive and uploading the file to Teams, but I suggested that Word documents would probably be better if he actually wants to be able to easily read their work and not just grade it for completion. The only thing is, I told him that it’s kind of difficult to do/show calculations in a Word document, so he decided to use a program that will simply mark the answers right or wrong and that is able to consider significant figures as well, while the written parts he will grade on a Word document.  

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!