Welcome 2021

Are you one of those people who believe in setting New Year’s resolutions? Well, I am!

A new year is like a fresh page in a nice Leuchtturm 1917 notebook, waiting for you to fill it in with ideas and thoughts about what you want to achieve. In this post, I want to try and give you a sense of my thought process for planning my year ahead.

Role-playing

I’ve been a big fan of role-playing games ever since I was in primary school. By far the best role-playing game in existence is Dungeons & Dragons, or D&D for short. What I particularly love about D&D is the ability to choose the role that you will be playing. I’m a wizard at heart, which in a roundabout way even translates into my real life role of being a clinician-scientist (I think).

So yes, I think about the my roles seriously!

One way this is helpful is when planning your life. I first read about this concept in Stephen Covey’s book ‘First Things First‘. This book changed my life, honestly. It taught me the idea of identifying the key roles that you have in life, and then thinking of what your priorities are for each role.

For me, the important roles I have right now are:

• Personal i.e. my relationship with myself
• Family member
• DPhil student in Clinical Neurosciences

And to a lesser extent:

• Friend
• Community member
• Neurologist / clinical lecturer

Sure, there are other roles that I occasionally occupy, but these are the ones I consider to be foundational to who I am. The key here is to be realistic with yourself; one cannot prioritise every single thing in life. For me, the most important responsibilities I have right now are related to my own self, my family members, and my PhD. That doesn’t mean I’ll be neglecting my other roles, just that if push comes to shove, I know which one to prioritise.

Take my role as a neurologist, for example. Undoubtedly, this is something very near and dear to me. I’ve wanted to be a neurologist since before going into medical school! But right this very moment, I’m not actually working as a neurologist, nor am I involved in teaching medical students. So even though this remains a crucial role for me, for now I’m content to put less emphasis on it while I focus on other aspects of my life.

Personal

First things first: what are my responsibilities to myself?

Here, I tend to split things into 3 categories: physical, mental, and spiritual.

Physically, I want to be healthy. This is by far the most important goal I have for 2021. Without health, it’s difficult to achieve anything else; health is wealth. My goal for this year is to improve 3 areas of my physical health: diet, movement, and sleep. Diet-wise, I want to follow Michael Pollan’s advice in his book ‘In Defense of Food‘:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

I’ve yet to come across better advice when it comes to food, so I’ll just stick with this one.

Movement is important, something that we don’t do very much in our modern lives. I’m not just talking about going to the gym for a cardio session (which I can’t do anyway these days thanks to the damn COVID restrictions). I’m talking about something more basic, the idea that we should try to be constantly moving during our waking lives. Part of this is walking more steps every day, part of it is me also toying with the idea of getting a standing desk at work. We’ll see how this goes.

Spiritually, this year I want to read and write more. I want to spend more time reading the Quran, not just for the sake of reading it, but in order to try and understand it more, and hopefully to commit more parts of it to memory. I also want to move away from reading day-to-day news (which is mostly horrible things) to consuming slower content: longform articles, medical journals, and The Economist (for news). Apart from writing in this blog, I want to try and develop a journalling habit where I physically write things in a notebook. Writing is therapeutic, especially when you do it with pen and paper I think. That’s why I’ve put reading and writing under my ‘spiritual’ category.

Family member

I am very grateful that I’ve been given this opportunity to spend more time with my wife and children. Being in a foreign country can be tough at times, but I’m hoping my kids will become more resilient following this experience. Time to teach them some grit!

Both my wife and I have been very busy in the past due to our clinical work, so getting to spend some quality time with our kids is a real blessing.

But there’s also another aspect to being a family member which is my relationship with my extended family. If I’m brutally honest with myself, this is the area where I have failed miserably in the past. This is the area that I most need to improve, and there’s no better time to start doing so than right now.

Although I’m mostly an introvert, someone who is perfectly happy to sit at home reading a book, I deeply admire people around me who are more outward-looking. My mother-in-law is one such example: someone who makes the effort to touch bases with countless other friends and family members, even if there’s no formal occasion. In contrast, I hardly even know my own cousins!

Truth be told, I’m a bit uncomfortable writing about these things because I’ve never really had close relationships with my extended family. I think this is a mistake, one I intend to rectify if I can inshaAllah.

Being 10,000 km away from everyone makes it harder to do so. Being in a pandemic doesn’t help either.

But the fact that times are difficult makes it even more important to make sure that everyone is OK. Put simply, I don’t want to be somebody who is successful on his own, while other people I should care about suffer in silence. That would be the ultimate irony, wouldn’t it, to live in a hyperconnected world where you know what a stranger had for breakfast (hint: it’s on their Instagram feed) but aren’t even aware that your family members are having problems putting food on the table. What a sad world that would be!

PhD student

I am cautiously optimistic about my DPhil. On the one hand, I know what I need to do in terms of data collection, data analysis etc. On the other hand, I have no idea how to plan for the future giving the rapidly-shifting nature of the pandemic and the government’s response to it.

Consider this example: how does one plan to test 30 more patients when one doesn’t even know how long the current restrictions are going to last?

Look, I understand that it’s difficult to plan and coordinate anything during a pandemic. But I also think that the UK government has mostly made a mess of it, and in fact, are pretty much clueless about what they need to be doing. As of last night, the UK is no longer part of the European Union, and people in government are talking as if this is a good thing! How did a once-mighty Empire end up abandoning their obligations like this? Or in the words of King Théoden of Rohan, ‘How did it come to this?’

How indeed.

Nevertheless, despite all the problems and challenges, I remain deeply interested in the topic. I think my area of research has important implications for my patients, and it is for their sake that I continue to struggle with the task of doing a PhD during a pandemic. May Allah ease the hardships, and make this journey a rewarding one for everyone involved.

So there you have it, my messy thought process for planning the year ahead. For what it’s worth, I’m constantly reassessing my goals, to make sure that they stay relevant to who I am and who I intend to be. Wish me luck!