The resting mind and outside influences on it.

Past couple days, I changed my routines up a bit.

Instead of watching shows vie media providers and working (household chores, etc.) through timed periods, I’ve been working instead whilst listening to Audible, most notably, Lee Child‘s Jack Reacher books in place of using the timer. In fact, I just recently finished the book Echo Burning and as with all Lee Child’s books, despite being a writer myself (admittedly, nowhere near as well-known as Child), it had an ending I never saw coming (well, not the actual outcome, that would have been obvious knowing Reacher’s character), but solving the actual crime, I missed most of the clues until it hit me in the face near the end when Reacher broke it down in the book. “Murder, She Wrote” a popular TV series comes to mind also when it came to me missing very subtle clues

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During my resting periods, I’ve been binging the Outlander which is a tv series derived from a book series by Diana Gabaldon, (what can I say, I’m addicted to really great story telling, and, even in my 50s, I continue to aspire to be like these great authors).

Finally, I’ve been using my online timer to work on my languages through Duolingo.

So just now, during my nap, my brains idea of resting is:

Re-enacting Outlander in Spanish with Reacher being the hero of the piece, me the heroine, and Jeff Harding narrating the scenes in English whilst playing the musical theme to Outlander in the background. 😆

Funny that the language chosen for my dream is Spanish when the language I was studying before falling asleep was Italian, but I can’t help wondering that it’s because Spanish is the language I’ve wanted to learn since my teen years (blame Madonna’s “La Isla Bonita” & Laura Branigan’s “Ti Amo”), the only language that topped that was German, difference being, I was more confident self-teaching myself German & more determined to learn that as it was part of my heritage, whereas Spanish was more a personal want.

To me, Spanish is romantic and beautiful, and I wasn’t overly worried about learning it as I figured, if I ever found the time to sit down to watch those educational cartoons (Dora being one of them), I MIGHT pick up on it eventually.

French & Italian (my only options in school), I had NO interest in my teens, and didn’t develop an interest in till my 50s. Recently learning that both languages are also weaved into my DNA has spiked my interest a bit, but French more so after reading/listening to the book about Catherine Dior, a book I was determined to read after binging the series: “The New Look“.

I honestly don’t even know why I’m studying Hungarian anymore. The language has a lot of bitter/sweet memories for me from childhood. More bitter than sweet and learning I don’t even have an ounce of Hungarian in my DNA has really killed my love for it… that and the fact that a lot of the words are ridiculously hard to pronounce, and I can’t get Yoda out of my head every time I’m learning it. In fact, it’s thanks to Yoda that I remember to put the sentences back to front when translating. Mum wasn’t kidding when she explained this to me when I was little, and it was one of the reasons she didn’t want me to learn the language.

I think I still am determined to learn the language since at least 3 of my dearest friends, both offline and on, are Magyar, which makes me fiercely loyal in my attempts to continue learning it.

The 6th language I’m learning is Chinese; I was watching a documentary on YouTube about the unwanted children of China whose parents ended up either in prison or executed due to their crimes. Listening to one of the staff who cares for these children, whilst reading the subtitles, and by now feeling confident that I could learn any language thanks to Duo, I gave myself the challenge to see if I could learn Chinese.

This actually surprised me as years before I knew of Duo, every time I heard of a westerner learning an Asian language, I would be awestruck by them, vowing to never attempt it myself as I deemed it too hard.

I’ve yet to learn to actually be able to read the characters, I think I only know 2 off by heart (outside of the Mahjong game), but the words themselves, I’m finding a breeze, although the tones I still struggle a bit with.

Also breezing through German, picking up Spanish and Italian fairly easily; the two, I find, are quite similar. I struggle a bit with French, but I know with time and a lot of practice, I’ll be able to breeze through it.

It’s only Hungarian, the one language I grew up with, I still struggle with immensely, frequently forgetting the difference between “in between”, “in front of” or “behind” or often confusing the words “musician” and “director”, amongst others. I only chose a couple of examples, but there are many others. One thing I will say about the Hungarian language, is you can turn any sentence into a tongue twister! I kind of wish they did; I might actually remember them then as I can recite many tongue twisters with ease! 😆

I just find it interesting that every little thing we do in our lives; what we listen to, what we watch, whatever our activities are, the mind will jumble everything together when it’s resting and come up with something akin to a mulligan stew of thoughts, so that once awake, although ready for the next round of activities, our thoughts will wander back to the curious mix of memories created from both past and current experiences.