Nova Daily - 23 March: Recap Week 12
Hi!
All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
- Blaise Pascal
According to the Wiki definition, meditation is the practice of trained attention and awareness to reach a state of calmness and clarity of mind. Meditation is deeply embedded in many different religious practices. Praying can be a form of meditation, but meditation doesn't require any belief in supernatural forces.
If, how often, how long, for what reason, and to what end you practice meditation is entirely up to you. If you meditate, that's your choice and your practice. I have no opinion on anyone else's spiritual practices, as long as what you do works for you and it remains with you.
There are a lot of ideas on meditation and mindfulness that I won't bore you with. But there's one thing that I like to mention here. If you sit down and don't do anything (which is much harder to do than you think at first), eventually your mind will begin to wander. If you allow the thoughts to lead to wherever they may go, along the way you'll have many different thoughts. They might be related, they might follow a more or less coherent path, and they might be completely random.
A pitfall of abundance
When I write my blog texts, I sometimes have the same experience. I start exploring one thought, I get other related thoughts, and before I know it I have a whole bouquet of thoughts. Simply by writing down this line, I had a thought about Hans Niemann's "Against the World" campaign, a thought about Carlsen's jeans beef, a thought about power struggles, group dynamics, fear of being ostracised, history, Napoleon, and I'll stop here as you get the point.
I like to know or learn something about many different topics, but I can't explore all of these thoughts with equal levels of diligence. When I write, I try to piece together a picture composed of the thoughts that I think are relevant to the topic. I want to put as many of them together as possible, to give a richer perspective from more different angles.
There's a typical pitfall in giving such an abundance of thoughts free reign. It's very tempting to try to treat every thought equally and include as many thoughts as possible within the story. The story will become much too long, and the thoughts will seem very much disconnected.
When I wrote my mini-essay on obsession, I realised that I couldn't include the topic that I initially wanted to write about. I didn't want to write my piece on obsession about Ginny Weasley. I wanted to make it about another Harry Potter-obsessed Gryffindor: Colin Creevey. But when I was writing, I realised that Ginny provides a far richer perspective on the natural process of maturing and overcoming obsession than Colin Creevey does.
Bottom line, and small writer tip: when you write, stick to one topic.
The week in chess
The week saw some quieter days of chess. I haven't managed to finish everything, but I'll do my best to do a better job on next week's work.
I'm happy with the work that I did on some lines of the English and a variation of the Trompowsky that I faced twice this week against the same opponent.
My rapid rating is steadily increasing. I expect that it won't be long before I'll make it into the 2100s, but you never know.
For next week I hope to finish the analysis on a Vote Chess game that I've finished with one of my Caro-Kann teams. I won't be sharing that analysis here on my blog, though.
My current scores:
- Rapid rating: 2092 (+49)
- Blitz rating: 2301 (=)
- Bullet rating: 2545 (+30)
- Survival: 62 (=)
- Puzzle Battle: 1762 (+56)
- Puzzles: 3587 (+13)
- Repertoire: 4066 moves (+3)
Blogs:
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-16-march-2025-recap-week-10
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-17-march-2025
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-18-march-2025
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-19-march-2025
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-20-march-2025
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-21-march-2025
https://www.chess.com/blog/nova-stone/nova-daily-22-march-2025
