Well, it’s finally here. My last editorial. This term has gone so fast. They always do, but this one more than most. I am so nervous about saying goodbye that I have, for the first time ever, the feeling of a frog in the back of my throat. Even though I’m not going anywhere, and I’ll be back with all the hard-hitting news people are concerned about—news like how to boil an egg without a pot—in the winter, it really seems like I’m going somewhere far away and for a very long time.
As always, this is the part where I thank the people who really stepped up to make this issue happen. I’ll still do that, but first I want to make a really personal thank you to everyone who helped in any way with this publication this term. I’m not sure how many people noticed, but that credits bar on the right side of this page has been filled to the brim this term with people. More often than not it was so full I had to start stacking names side by side to make them all fit. I don’t have the space here to go through each and every person, but thank you. This has been the best term I have had so far; it was because of the paper, and so by extension because of the tremendous amount of hard work you have all put into it.
I like to take a short interlude to thank a few people who didn’t actively work on this paper, but were never the less very important to its success. Firstly, my mother, who read each issue the moment it went online even when it was well past her bedtime. To my father, who between getting me my first factory job, and buying me those LEGO Technic and then the Mindstorms sets did more to prepare me for engineering than anyone else. To my sister, who was actually pretty nice most of the time when she wasn’t being a pain. And because I already mentioned my maternal grandparents in the first issue, to my paternal grandmother, who is always around with the candy and snacks that I know I want but shouldn’t have.
There are a bunch of articles that really caught my eye this issue. The most notable is the absolutely massive, coming in at around 3000 words, Acta Diurna on page 16. I had to cut it down a fair bit, so check our website for the full version. I also recommend On the Shoulders of Giants where Brigita and Sherwin have crafted two pieces about some remarkable scientific talent from the past.
And don’t forget to check out the Tin Soldier on page 7, which I’m sure you will all find quite colourful.
Finally, I am proud to announce my replacement Editor-In-Chief, Raeesa! Raeesa has been a strong contributor to The Iron Warrior since her 1A term, always taking on the daunting task of trying to get a handle on large, political, and otherwise difficult articles. She will be taking over in the winter term, and I look forward to working under her in what I anticipate will be a dynamite term.
In the intervening period, Meagan will be EIC this fall. Her passionate discourse on why receipts are massively outdated (which you might remember became our first issue’s PCP) was the inspiration that lead me to write my editorials about whatever was important to me, regardless of how irrelevant it might seem to others. I cannot wait to see what gold she will produce in her editorials.
This is it, my final editorial. Goodbye soapbox; it has been an absolute pleasure.
So final exams are coming up fast now. In fact, they got such a jump on me that I scheduled this last issue of the paper to come out the day after (or evening of, depending on how on-top of things I am) classes end. Around this time of the year mental health always comes to the top of everyone’s agenda, and study skills, time management skills, and life balance strategies are the hottest topics around. Now there is probably a very good reason for all of that, and I can appreciate that this is a really difficult time for a lot of people. I’m not going to talk to you about mental health today as such, but it is somewhat related and definitely a good segue into my article.
What I want to talk about is the learned skill of listening to yourself. This isn’t a story about finding your inner person, or balancing your energies, or whatever else people generally mean when they say that you need to reflect and look inward. This is about the really practical skill of assessing your life and how difficult that can be, at least for me.
Before I got a phone, I used to listen to myself all the time; there wasn’t much else to do. Going for a bike ride? Guess I’m stuck with my internal monologue for the next hour or so. In bed at night? There’s no-one around to talk to but yours truly. When I was almost 18, I finally did get a phone that I shared with my sister; it had become a pain to always have to mooch off friends when we needed to contact people. Shortly thereafter, I got a phone of my own. It was great, but I didn’t realize what I was giving up when I got it; personal time without the strong pull of enticing phone-based distractions. It’s a loss I am still learning the value of.
The reason why “silent time” is important is simple; when there’s something else—anything else—going on, you don’t have to face the problems that are confronting you. Maybe you aren’t very happy with your life right now, but it’s easy to ignore that when you are having a laugh at the expense of some poor cat in a YouTube video. There are a whole host of boring but important things that can get pushed aside when there is something more important to think about. And not all of those are bad things that you are pushing aside. Some are very good things. Things like “I’m really proud of how hard I studied this midterm season. How can I do the same next term?” It could be anything.
So what’s the solution? There are many that I use. They all have different degrees of effectiveness. But they all are basically the same; asking yourself simple, fundamental questions about how you think your life is going. Think of it a really cheap auto-psychoanalysis. (Free I guess, if you don’t count your time. And Mr. Freud would need your time as well as your money.) Sometimes I just close my eyes and try to think of nothing, see what instinctively pops into my head. This may or may not be akin to meditation—I’ve never really checked—but on the rare cases where it doesn’t immediately jump to what hill-climbing algorithms act like in an iteration-dependent search space, I’ve found that it’s a good way to figure out what problems I’ve been pushing out of the way, or what issues I’ve been ignoring.
Another thing I do is what I call “going off the clock.” I record everything I will do in a given day in an agenda. It is always in the crook of my arm, and I am constantly writing in it. Sometimes I will fill up tomorrow’s section before the day even starts. What is it good for, in addition to being an unbeatable card to play whenever the “I have the most work” contests crop up, is organizing my day so I never forget anything. The down side is that I am also constantly aware of everything I have to do, and I am always worrying that something is not on there or trying to prioritise what is. So every once and a while, I go off the clock. I search my brain for anything that I haven’t written down yet, then I close my agenda and go somewhere it is not. If I think of anything that I need to do—and would ordinarily write it in my agenda—I say “I’m sure I’ll remember it again before it’s due” and continue on.
I could go on and on, but I hope I have made my case. Be sure to take some time every once and a while to listen to the things you’ve been ignoring; it’s a surprisingly difficult and fruitful thing to do. And I would like to make one more comment: I love technology. I have my phone on me about as much as my agenda. I don’t blame technology for making it hard for me to listen to myself, and even if I did it would still probably be worth it. This is just a way to mitigate one of the more negative repercussions. I’m sure there are even technological solutions to help people be more introspective (maybe a parental lock to turn off all your electronics for an hour per day). But until I find one—and I’m not looking—I will relish the times I remember to listen.
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