This year, I will reflect on the four cardinal virtues through daily practice and meditation, intentionally focusing on one per season. I started and finish the year with prudence – or the rational capacity to distinguish good from evil. Every week, I will publish an update on this blog, in the form of a free-flowing meditation.

This week, I reflected on rest-after-the-fact, and how to deal with the confusion of things ending.

It is prudence to prepare early, but sometimes, schedules are not optimate, and things have to be done at the last minute. When that is the case, as it was for me this week on Monday, it is prudence – maybe – to take time off after the fact. But how should one approach that period of time after things are completed, yet before a new cycle starts?

This is how I found myself on Tuesday, the year not ended yet, but all my goals for 2017 either completed, or deliberately postponed. Leaving days to pure chance, vacant, seemed unwise – but for some reason, I recoiled at calling the three weeks to the end of the year ‘holidays’. Instead, I listed a few things to do by December 31: see friends, plan for 2018, clear my folders and notes, and – whatever that means – progress on my PhD.

Wednesday was another day off – I had booked a massage and flotation tank experience from a Facebook ad over two months ago, and headed off to Heidelberg West – of all places – where the clinic was located. I left early, coffee’d on the mall, floated, got a massage, then ate a delicious falafel at Kebabs on Bell, hiding in the aircon from the 36+ degree day. The trip, though seemingly absurd, was a fun adventure, where I discovered a new part of Melbourne, new stories, new people – and I found this a good way to rest.

There is prudence in saying this is too much, and even if I disappoint, I will not deliver the goods. I was reminded of this over the end of the week, as I saw myself failing to ‘get things done’, on Thursday, then on Friday. Instead, I hovered rather aimlessly, till, Friday 6pm, I gave in, sat in the Henley Club armchair with a glass of wine, and finished off the week with friends.