"I felt like I haven't done anything productive today..."
Aside from reading the modules and getting a grasp of the work required in the next few months to achieve PhD milestones, I haven't done anything concrete, tangible or completed.
Perhaps, all my working life as a clinician I am used to see immediate results. When I treat patients, I use outcome measures and record progress. I rely on objective measurements to justify my work and my time. This at the end of the day, I call work. I can physically see, experience and record what I have done to earn my position, value and wage. My contribution to the society.
One of the PhD candidate warned me, that the first few months will be a slow start. It has only been a couple of days and I am feeling inconsequential. He could have better described it as a "very very slooooow start." or I am just getting too impatient to get into the thick of it?
I know, people say "Make the most out of your downtime" or even I try to live the Italian way of "La dolce far niente"- the sweetness of doing nothing. But, at this moment these are uninvited feelings, unwarranted of my existence.
I turn to philosophy, when I can't be pacified by distraction, meditation or mindfulness.
I am defined by what I do. As Jean-Paul Sartre would account on "Being and Nothingness", This is my current predicament, my tragedy...
I am action-oriented, I seek meaning to what I call a productive day. I have this perpetual urge to fulfil what I expect of myself or others expectation of me- "My Being."
But, I struggle as I take this new path- my PhD journey, I now question my existence, devoid of physical actions and societal role. Who am I now? - "My Nothingness."
Sartre would argue that there are 'phenomena of being', and maybe this just a matter of emotional consciousness, and that is just how to describe my feeling today...
Aside from reading the modules and getting a grasp of the work required in the next few months to achieve PhD milestones, I haven't done anything concrete, tangible or completed.
Perhaps, all my working life as a clinician I am used to see immediate results. When I treat patients, I use outcome measures and record progress. I rely on objective measurements to justify my work and my time. This at the end of the day, I call work. I can physically see, experience and record what I have done to earn my position, value and wage. My contribution to the society.
One of the PhD candidate warned me, that the first few months will be a slow start. It has only been a couple of days and I am feeling inconsequential. He could have better described it as a "very very slooooow start." or I am just getting too impatient to get into the thick of it?
I know, people say "Make the most out of your downtime" or even I try to live the Italian way of "La dolce far niente"- the sweetness of doing nothing. But, at this moment these are uninvited feelings, unwarranted of my existence.
I turn to philosophy, when I can't be pacified by distraction, meditation or mindfulness.
I am defined by what I do. As Jean-Paul Sartre would account on "Being and Nothingness", This is my current predicament, my tragedy...
I am action-oriented, I seek meaning to what I call a productive day. I have this perpetual urge to fulfil what I expect of myself or others expectation of me- "My Being."
But, I struggle as I take this new path- my PhD journey, I now question my existence, devoid of physical actions and societal role. Who am I now? - "My Nothingness."
Sartre would argue that there are 'phenomena of being', and maybe this just a matter of emotional consciousness, and that is just how to describe my feeling today...
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