A morning bird story & a bit on stress and relaxation

Greetings from the other side.

The day started quite interestingly, as my girlfriend opened up one of our closets and a small bird flew out. Poor little thing was so panicked. We managed to confine it to one room, and then I went in and opened the window so it could get out. It must have been a terrifying experience for the little bird, feeling trapped and not really knowing what was going on or who us giants were. We have found where we think it got in, and we are now taking measures to make sure it doesn't happen again.

One aspect of living in the country side that I find very relaxing is looking through a window and watching all the small birds fly and jump around outside. You feel a lot closer to nature and the natural world out here, than I ever did while I was living in a city. Though Umeå as a city did have quite a lot of forested areas within the city as well. It still wasn't the same as this though. That's not to say I didn't enjoy living there either. It was a nice city to live in, and I highly recommend people to go there if they haven't been there already. It's also a good place to study if you are a student. Though I should probably stop talking about this before I start sounding like an advertisement. Just saying it how I feel having lived there for many years. :)

Now onto the subject of stress and the importance of relaxation.

Stress is such a negative thing for us humans, at least in too high quantities it is. A bit of stress is fine, for the most part. Excessive amounts of stress however is part of the issue with today's society. And different people have different thresholds for how much stress they can handle. People get burned out, stressed out, suffer from depression and anxiety because of stress and the weight of expectation. I know this because I have been there myself in the past. As have my girlfriend, and many others. Therefore I think it so important to find those peaceful moments in life, enjoy them and cherish them. Being able to just relax for a moment is so incredibly important. Some people have a day a week, for example Sunday, that is devoted to rest. No, I am not talking specifically about Christians here, as that doesn't hold true for all Christians. It is more the idea I am talking about. Having a day devoted to rest, relaxation and re-charging of your inner batteries can be so incredibly important. I'm not saying you should stay in bed all day or just lay around on the couch watching movies. What I mean is that it should be a day where you do things that you enjoy, that aren't stressful to you or weighted down by a bunch of "musts" or "have to"s. Living in the modern society can be very stressful to a lot of people. There are a lot of expectations, work, etc. So having a day when you can just relax can be incredibly important.

I am not saying that letting yourself rest one day a week will keep you from burning out. All I am saying is that it can't hurt to focus on yourself and the things that make you happy and relaxed once in a while, rather than the things that you "should" or "must" do. I think that is good for your soul.

See you all on the other side!

Campaign reflections & A short story

Greetings from the other side.

Feeling a bit tired today, but hopefully I can get some creative stuff done this evening. Would like to continue writing on my world-building, as the idea of one day running a tabletop RPG campaign in it is growing on me quite a lot. Will of course need to find players for it, etc, but that'll be a problem for further down the line. :) And yes, I know I said in a previous post that the world was a separate project that I was making to see what I could create if I gave myself no deadlines and complete creative freedom, not tied down by a specific tabletop rpg system or any specific campaign ideas. I have found however, that as I am building this world, a lot of ideas for campaigns are starting to take form based on the information I write down about this world. So in a sense, it is not the campaign that gives birth to the world, but the world itself that gives birth to the campaign, if that makes sense. I still have a lot of work left to do though, before I feel comfortable with using the world for a campaign, but it is coming along nicely. The fact that I have now started making maps for it is also a huge boost to me. It is 'only' world maps of individual continents or lands at the moment, but they really help me put everything into perspective a bit more.

The creative process is really calming to me. It almost becomes meditative at times, as I loose myself in the process of writing and coming up with ideas. Sometimes, I don't even have a pre-planned idea of what I want to write, it just comes to me as I sit there in front of the screen with a blank document in front of me. It is kinda like when I write this blog. I don't always have an idea what I want to write about. I just start and the words just start flowing. A good example, tying back to the tabletop RPGs, I had a character (well, I still technically have the character, it is just that the campaign is on ice for a bit) who was an elven ranger in a 4e D&D game. I initially wrote up about a page or two of backstory for the character, which were mostly bullet points to be honest, but then one day I decided I was going to expand on it to give my DM  (Dungeon Master) a bit more to work with. So I sat down with a blank document in Word, and had the two pages I had already written on the side, and started writing. After a fairly short while I had about 11 or 12 pages written, plus reference lists of people the character had met in their backstory, a list of locations, etc. It was about at this point that the DM begged me not to write any more stuff. So I stopped, even though I could have fleshed it out more and written a lot more information as well, and ended up with far more pages than I already had, but I decided to be kind to our DM. ;)

See you all on the other side!