Author: Shari

A couple of days after I jotted down my last entry here, someone dear to us drew her last breath. I was privileged to have the chance to be with her and watch over her on her final journey. She was my mother-in-law.

I wouldn’t say that our relationship was always smooth sailing. But the last few years had been rather good, especially after she found someone special to share her life with. She seemed happier.

She was diagnosed with a rare blood disease, possibly a form of leukemia, in October the previous year. Since then, she had been hospitalised a couple of times. Once, it was because of a fever that wouldn’t subside for about a month. The second hospitalisation would be her last, again because of a prolonged fever.

During that stay, the medical team found abnormalities in her intestines and decided to operate. She underwent surgery twice. When a third operation was proposed, she refused. She had had enough.

Interestingly, she actually seemed to get a little better for a while, so none of us expected things to take a turn for the worse so quickly.

My husband and daughter went to visit her without expecting that they would find her on her deathbed. When they arrived, I was still at work and completely unaware of what was happening. After work, I received a call and took a taxi to the hospital.

She died about an hour after I arrived.

I am grateful that I was able to be there and say goodbye.

She had been such a big part of our lives that it was very difficult to come to terms with her loss. We are moving forward, as I believe she would have wanted us to, but I am still sorry that she could not have stayed with us a little longer.

She loved my daughter very much and helped take care of her while she was growing up. I wish she could have been here to celebrate more of my daughter’s birthdays, her graduations, her wedding, perhaps even her first child.

Wherever you are, Krisztina, thank you for everything you did for us.

Despite the difficult moments we had along the way, I do believe I was lucky to have you as my mother-in-law.

“We are never ready to say goodbye forever, even though we know it is part of life. Our hearts are heavy when we lose someone so special, but as we mourn their death, we also celebrate their life.”

I started using Coursera in 2014. The first course I took was The Clinical Psychology of Children and Young People from the University of Edinburgh. It was free at the time, and I remember receiving a certificate without having to pay for it. Coursera and MOOCs were still relatively new to me then, and I was mainly interested in the opportunity to learn something outside a traditional classroom.

After finishing that course, I did not immediately become a regular Coursera student. Several years passed before I started looking seriously at online learning again.

When I returned to Coursera, one of the courses that caught my attention was Learning How to Learn. A course about learning itself sounded unusual to me, so I signed up.

At the time, I could enrol in the course for free and choose whether I wanted to pay for a certificate. I was not taking it for a job application or qualification; I simply wanted the knowledge. Because of that, I decided not to pay for the certificate.

That course led me to others. By May 2020, I had completed six more courses on Coursera. Some I took for free, while for others I paid for the certificate or assessment access.

One reason I liked Coursera was the structure. The courses I took were divided into weekly modules, with assessments at the end of each section. Depending on the course, these could include objective questions, essays or PowerPoint presentations that were assessed by other learners.

Of course, there is an enormous amount of information available online for free. But access to information is not always the same thing as actually completing a course. I know that I learn better when there is a clear structure, a sequence to follow and something that keeps me accountable from one week to the next. The weekly assessments helped with that.

The most recent course I had completed when I originally wrote this post was Excel Skills for Business: Intermediate II, which I finished on 28 May 2020.

It was part of a four-course series, and I had completed three of the four courses. I wanted to continue with the advanced course, but I decided to postpone it because I needed to concentrate on getting my driving licence first.

This was also the first Coursera course I paid for. I use Excel daily for work, and I wanted to improve my understanding of a tool I was already using rather than simply collect another certificate. For this particular course, access to the assessed work required payment, and I felt the cost was worth it because the structure encouraged me to keep progressing.

At the time I wrote this, the answer was yes. What appealed to me most was not the certificate itself but having a structured way to keep learning subjects that interested me or were useful in everyday work.

For someone who enjoys learning but benefits from having a course laid out step by step, Coursera was worth exploring. I could easily see myself continuing to use it for years to come.

One of the things I have been trying to improve is the amount of digital clutter I keep around. Files, photos, downloads, random documents — all the things that quietly pile up because deleting and organising them can always be postponed until another day.

For some reason, digital clutter can feel almost as overwhelming as physical clutter. At least with a messy room, you can see what you are dealing with. On a computer, everything can be hidden inside folders, drives and devices until you actually start looking.

I had put it off for quite a while simply because I did not know where to begin.

I am no Marie Kondo. I am just trying to make a few practical changes in my life and record what works for me. Some people seem naturally organised. I am not one of them. 😁

Once I stopped looking at the whole mess as one enormous job, though, the process became much simpler.

1. Collect everything into one place so I can actually see what I have.
2. Sort the files by type, and then by year, month or another system that makes sense.
3. Go through one folder at a time and decide what is a duplicate, what I want to keep and what can finally go.
4. Try not to create the same mess again.

That last one is probably the important part. 😁

After spending hours rearranging, sorting and deleting files, I realised that the difficult part was not really the organising itself. It was allowing everything to accumulate for so long that starting felt like a major project.

So I want to become more careful about what I keep in the first place. Downloads I no longer need can be deleted. Photos do not have to exist in five copies. Random files do not need to sit on my desktop forever simply because I might look at them again someday.

I would also rather spend a few minutes cleaning things up regularly than sacrifice another afternoon to a giant digital purge. Daily may be ambitious, but weekly sounds manageable.

What surprised me was how much better the computer felt afterwards. Nothing physical had changed around me, but opening it and seeing everything organised gave me the same feeling as walking into a tidy, clean room.

My future self will probably thank me for this one. 💖