tired

BLOGANUARY 2025 DAY 8

A slightly less illustrious one-word title for today’s post. I have been working really hard this week and although it’s only Wednesday (!) I’m feeling ready for the weekend. This is quite a new sensation for me as I don’t normally take a weekend, as I don’t really know what to do. I enjoy my art and illustration and writing but the last few days have required proper brain work and I feel I have pushed a lot of ideas into reality, and kinda just done things rather than thinking about something for weeks and then drifting into it.

When I kept bees, I remember being fascinated by, well, many many things, but one concept I really identified with was optic flow. Bees sense distance by the amount of stuff they fly past, not by how far they fly: this measurement is optic flow, so the amount of information passing through the eye per unit of distance. So, when they report back to their hivemates about a great nectar source nearby, they don’t communicate how far away it is, but by the number of things they have to fly past in order to reach it. I suppose it’s like us saying that “to get to the shop you go past the letterbox, the church, the house with the horse box and it’s just past the bus stop”, rather than “it’s 200 metres away”. I feel like this with how I spend my time: if I have crammed a lot of different thoughts and ideas and emails and suggestions into a particular day I feel like I have had more days than the time allows. Therefore it now feels like I have already done a week’s worth of work, which is frankly pretty satisfying and motivating, especially after a slack couple of weeks over the holidays. I’m off to London tomorrow for the evening, and have some stuff to do in the morning but I must find some time to just let ideas percolate for a bit.

Hence why I am now going to go to bed, as like a honey bee, I need my sleep. See y’all on the morrow…