2021 Recap

My dad, Pravin, and my nephew were all born on the 12th of their respective months.

I moved into my childhood home and spent four months watching my dad die. Losing a parent is a (mostly) universal human experience. Other folks have been through this. There is advice and wisdom to draw upon. And yet, when the time comes, you are radically unprepared.

Other things happened. Kids grew. Vaccines were disseminated. My boss quit. We reconnected with friends in person. More infectious COVID variants emerged. My new boss quit. Kids grew. Boosters were disseminated. Even more infectious COVID variants emerged. A number of my work friends quit. Kids grew.

It’s been a year.

Successes

• See family 2x. I used the last month of my paternity leave to visit my father in North Carolina. My parents were vaccinated, and my dad’s cancer was not responding to chemo. We stayed as he continued to decline and left after he passed away. During our stay we saw a ton of family and friends, the people whose life my dad has touched. Death sets a deadline. Limited time brings folks together in a way nothing else can.

Partial Successes

• Read 26 books (7 books that have won both the Hugo and Nebula). I’m so close. I read 28 books, but only six were joint winners of the Hugo and Nebula. I’m in the middle of the seventh, but I couldn’t finish by midnight. Of the six, The Dispossessed was my favorite. I won’t go into details; just read it. Ursula Le Guin is both timeless and ahead of her time.
• Move into my house. We set up Pravin’s room. It’s the best room in the house, with glow in the dark stars, the comfiest mattress, and cool art. We also fixed a few misaligned doors, and made progress on the attic and the garage. But we’re not done. We have not unpacked every box, and we need to organize and purge the stuff in those boxes. We’ll try again in 2022.
• Teach my son how to ride a bike / scooter. Pravin knows how to ride a scooter! We’re still working on the bike. Maybe in 2022 Pravin can learn how to pedal, and we can get Leela started on the balance bike.
• Take a long vacation. I didn’t get the vacation I had envisioned. Family took precedence, and COVID got in the way. I did take a small vacation and a few weeks off at home. I still need a real break.

Journals can take quite a beating over a year.

• Atomic Habits journal (6m). The Atomic Habits journal has dedicated space for one-sentence journaling and habit tracking. I stopped tracking habits after two months. I couldn’t keep up. One-sentence journaling worked. In fact, I maintained two journals — the Atomic Habits journal and this three-year couple’s journal (my wife bought it for our anniversary). Limited space reduces my writing anxiety and makes reflection tractable. It worked so well, I just bought another Atomic Habits journal for 2022.
• Continue bullet journal task tracking and migration (9m). I modified the original bullet journal system to meet my needs, but the basic algorithm of rapid logging and migrating tasks is the same. It works for me, and I’ll continue in 2022.
• Design my life. Roughly based on the talk, I did some reflection and made changes at work to align my interests with my day to day. But because of the chaos of 2021, the changes haven’t fully gone into effect. I hope to settle into a better day-to-day to see the changes through.

Failures

• 4-pack by 40. I moved to the south, ate a lot of southern food, and drank a bunch of sweet tea. You can extrapolate the results.
• 20m workout 3x a week (6mo). I tried home workouts and worked with a trainer from Future.co, but I couldn’t keep routine going.
• 20m Flexibility for 2x a week (6mo). Here is a cautionary tale. I didn’t prioritize flexibility. And my muscles became all out of whack to the point where I developed sciatic pain. I doing PT right now, which is promising, but there are other scenarios that are preferable.
• 80 hours of creative time. I was making pretty great progress earlier in the year, but like every year for the past five years, creative time is always gets cut first. I starting to think that the only way I’m gonna get creative time is if I integrate it into work or family activities.