Reflections of a restless eccentric

 As always, I write this post on my birthday, reflecting on all that life has given me. This year has been utterly magical for me, and I watched many of my long cherished dreams come true. But the biggest change, something that I think of as the reason for all these good things, is my perspective shift. I look at life very differently from a few years ago, and that makes all the difference. As Wayne Dyer says, When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. But first, let me tell you about all the wonderful things that happened this year. The biggest of them all: I finished and defended my PhD. This has been a dream for me since high school, and I can't tell you how good it feels to finally see it in reality. But it is more than the research I did, the papers I published, and all of that stuff, even though those are pretty cool too. The process taught me so much about life. The uncertainty, the rejections, the darkness. Parts that we struggle so much with...