Last week, Everett Bogue (author of the art of being minimalist) posted an article on how to imagine your ideal reality. This article inspired me to write about why I decided to call this blog re-imagining myself.

A lot of what we are and what we do is powered by our imagination of the person we want to be. We are able to work harder and endure more, if what we are doing is bringing us towards this goal. Three years ago, I imagined myself as a researcher (in life-sciences) living a life filled with critical thinking, experimenting but also time to spend with friends, partake in political action and so on. Working in Boston in the last two years, I had to realize that this image failed. Life-sciences here are a competitive business. Everyone strives and puts up enormous amounts of work. Very few people somehow successful in this field actually have family (or family life). For most of them their life seems to consist of work. This is fine if you imagine yourself as a constantly working person, sacrificing yourself to the advancement of your field. However this is not how I imagined myself, working myself close to burn-out in the beginning of this year.

My next goal was simply to get out of there. Luckily my PI was supportive and so mid-June I ended up in Vienna. I still kept on doing data analysis and writing papers for my lab, but the workload was much reduced. What still made me unhappy was: I lost the image of the person I wanted to be. Thus Re-imagining Myself become my imperative.

I started this process in the first night I arrived in Vienna. I needed a place to work and decided to work from home. Through looking at Simple Desks, I stumbled across minimalist living. Not being a fan of a lot of stuff (I have too much and I am a person who can not keep order if there is too much). The ideas of filling your life with actions you enjoy rather than objects clicked with me. I still haven't imagined the human being I'd like to be, however I have a more immediate goal: I want to go sailing in the Mediterranean next summer. Therefore, I learned how to sail for the last two weeks (while working between 10-14h in Boston). I enjoyed doing so and resent the weeks I can't go out sailing often.

This simple goal gave me the power to carry on. Change my habits into becoming an early riser (It's Sunday and I woke up at 5am without an alarm clock, the jet-lag in the helped in the first days). And being more cheerful during the day (Although I have to confess I was extremely angry from Thursday to Saturday noon, simply because my week was filled with days of doing shit at work, keeping me there for at least 14 hours a day). I went sailing yesterday and it was one of the best times I've ever had out on the Charles. Now I can carry on for the next few days, before I go back to Vienna.