Saturday, 31 December 2022

Though I usually will casually reflect back on what happened over the year, and will also usually write out some goals for the coming year, this year I’ve tried being more structured.

I returned to what I used to do for the end of the year at work: I made what we used to call a brag sheet — that is, a fairly detailed list of ‘accomplishments.’ During my career, I had rather ambivalent feelings about this. On the one hand, it was usually nice to lay out all the things I’d done, as it is easy to forget both particular items as well as just the amount I’d done; on the other hand, since this was grist for the annual evaluation process, there was sometimes anxiety associated with it.

Having now finished the 2022 accomplishments, I find that it has all of the positives and none of the negatives of my previous practice. It’s nice to see what I’ve done, revisit and reflect on some of the activities/accomplishments, and think about what more I want to do in 2023. In particular, I find that I’ve made a lot more progress on things I wanted to do — writing, hiking, geology learning/travel – than had surfaced when I casually thought back about the year.

What went well

Health and wellness

The major win of the year was my successful prostatectomy and my smooth recovery and reconditioning, the latter ‘proved’ by my hiking trips to Yosemite and Iceland. What good fortune. And, that word reminds me of a quote I read recently: Good luck is often privilege in disguise. And indeed, while my efforts – to maintain physical fitness, and keeping a close watch on my health – have paid off, I must recognize that the time, place and class which I happen to inhabit are what give me access to surgery and the financial and other support for it.

As part of the reconditioning, I did physical therapy for my elbow tendonitis, which turned out to be physical therapy for my shoulders. I parlayed that consultation into getting some PT exercises for my core more generally, and have developed a strength and flexibility regime that I believe I can maintain on a daily basis. I have had several multi-week episodes of maintaining it, but need to be more consistent and turn it into a daily habit. I think establishing daily strength and flexibility training as a daily habit is doable for 2023.

Writing

After health and fitness, I think I have made great strides in making writing a more central part of my life. I am blogging regularly – 2–8x/month – and have also been more active on facebook, where I posted daily summaries of the Iceland trip, and the two Yosemite trips, both of which received positive feedback from my network. I feel like I’ve gained momentum, or perhaps created positive feedback loop in which I write because of the personal and social rewards I get from it, which in turn lead to more writing.

I think one reason for this success is that I’ve succeeded in creating a sort of a ‘personal ecosystem’ that consists of a reworked web page which ‘backgrounds’ my former professional work, and a blog – now two blogs – which service as a place for my journaling and note-taking where I am more likely to look back and revisit or at least reflect than my prior process of creating long documents that live on my computer.

What I want to consider for 2023 is creating a more public-facing blog, in contrast to my current blogs which are publicly-accessible but really written for my own use. Whether or not I actually do that, I feel that the current re-structuring of my personal blogs has been a great win, even if I do not pursue a public-facing blog and just stick to the occasional facebook post.

Yet another goal would be to attempt to publish one or more essays in an online or print magazine. I’m not sure how deeply I care about this, but it might be fun to try.

Hiking

I had a great time hiking in 2022. I would like to do more and although I am really attracted to the familiar ground of Yosemite, I think it would be good to increase diversity. One possibility here is to do a week of hiking in Arizona this winter, taking advantage of the standing invitation from Kim and Steve; and also perhaps add on a side trip to the Grand Canyon. If that goes well, perhaps an early spring trip to somewhere in Utah? Also, in the past, I’ve entertained the idea of doing some hiking in the eastern Sierra, staying in some resorts that give easy access to the John Muir Trail.

And, finally, I’d like to do more hiking in this region — there are a lot of places to go in Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin that are a day’s drive, and much less overhead than getting on a plane to go somewhere.

All that said, I do have a lottery entry for the 2023 High Sierra Camps, which I am hopeful about. That would be, I think, 5 night trip, sometime mid-summer.

Geology

The highlight of the year in Geology was the “What is this Rock, 3” course. I’ve just learned that WitR 1 is going to be offered in June, so I will try to get into that. The joint purchase of lapidary equipment with CS was also fun, and I enjoyed polishing rocks and figuring out how to limit the scope of rocks that I’d like to collect: 1) North Shore cobbles, cut and polished to show interior structure; and 2) rheological specimens like ventifacts and various forms of lava.

What could be improved: courses/learning

In terms of things I’m dissatisfied with, I think the main takeaway is that neither of the long courses I took – a creative non-fiction class at the Loft, and Geomorphology at the U — was very satisfying. The Loft course was too touchy-feely and geared towards memoir and personal disclosure for my tastes, and the Geomorphology course was a bit too applied, and also more focused on working out that math than I was interested in. Instead, I did a lot more learning via Havruta – the process of reading and discussing a book, week by week, with someone else. This is both a great way to learn, and a very nice way to spend time with another person. I’d count the development of Havruta as a replicable practice one of the big achievements of 2022. I should, however, note that the What is this Rock course was a fantastic learning experience, as was the trip to Iceland.

For 2023, I want to see if I can manage to complete one or more online MOOC-style courses. The exception noted in the previous paragraph also makes me inclined to look for more field-learning opportunities. I just paused in writing this to email Jim Miller to see if more ‘What is this Rock’ courses are in the offing. I also wonder what other courses of this sort might be available — I now recall that there was some sort of Geology of Yosemite course offered onsite, except for 2022 it was offered while I was in Iceland. Another thing to look into would be the

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Those are my thoughts.

Bye 2022, hello 2023