2022: One year. Four quarters. 12 months. 52 weeks.
257,951 words accumulated from my journaling.
I also observed that the math in a year is a bit funny:
While January to March has 90 days (91 in a leap year) and April to June has 91 days, July to September counts 92 days as well as October to December. 52 weeks x 7 days yields only 364 which leaves us a day short, but 52 divided by four yields a 13 week quarter.
The art and science of calendars is perhaps not that straightforward.
Why undertake this project at all?
Wisdom. Self-knowledge. Reflection. To look for any patterns knowing full well the unreliability of human memory and cognitive biases. To identify and cultivate those activities and relationships that were conducive to my growth while eliminating those that were not while also keeping in mind that growth and pleasure are often negatively correlated. In sum, to “know thyself”, as Socrates insisted.
The project was surprisingly difficult subjectively even though the work had already been done. The difficulty lay in precisely the voluminous verbiage and sheer tedium of sifting through notes while aspiring to progressively distill my writing into something apprehensible, something approaching signal from the vast noise.
After learning my lesson a couple of years ago about simply starting a new document for each month rather than keeping it in one annual document (an obvious oversight that was made salient by simple impatience around loading times for Google Docs over a certain word count), I went through my monthly journals to extract the weekly reviews into one document. From there, I organized the weekly reviews into quarters. I then went through each quarter and wrote some observations, notes and reflections in bullet points.
Subsequently, I took all of those reflections from my quarterly observations and am attempting to make that into something worth sharing.
As foreshadowed above, some attempts at filtering the qualia of my life into something readable:
How does one measure a year?
What was expected? What was unexpected?
What would I double down on? What would I subtract?
Is this exercise even worthwhile?
Addressing the last point directly, I would prefer to make this a much smoother process going forward as I neglected some levels of compression at different intervals, like awkwardly shifting gears driving a manual transmission. To that end – monthly summaries and quarterly summaries throughout would have made it much more manageable. I would also like to add a handful of quantitative measures like health, relationships, emotional wellbeing, finances, work, creative output. One idea I have around this is scoring related to the Big Five OCEAN traits (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism). As I believe openness to be my cardinal trait, which tracks with the highly creative, intellectual stimulation and creative output will remain important metrics of overall life satisfaction. By that measure, 2022 was a great year.
This comprehensive level of annual review was inspired by Chris Cordry’s article on Tim Ferriss’ approach to Past Year Reviews, though my process has been much messier. In it, he suggests perusing one’s calendar week by week to glean any useful information.
It was glaringly obvious that my calendar app didn’t contain particularly useful or accurate enough information to derive anything tangible. My bad. This could also present a potential solution for scoring my week in shorthand.
By contrast, I’ve been writing journal entries fairly consistently since 2018. The last few years have been fairly strong, though this year was among the strongest coincident with adopting 750words.com, a platform which gamifies journaling while providing all sorts of interesting insights on one’s writing habits. For example, I tripled my word count from 10k to 30k in the following month after beginning from April to May.
In fairness, this journaling is mostly rambling half-baked thoughts and often recounts fairly mundane trivialities but has also served as a valuable resource for meandering, reflecting, emotional processing and capturing the peaks and valleys of my life in writing.
As mentioned, I manage to maintain a weekly cadence of planning the week ahead and reviewing the past week, which entails some additional labor. The saving grace is its reliable structure of simply following the days of the week. It is also a humbling challenge to episodic memory.
Why is this at all relevant to you?
Perhaps this is a cautionary tale about annual reviews and how not to conduct one. Were it not for social accountability, I doubt I would have the motivation to persevere through the slog of my own life’s writings.
And yet this was definitely an invaluable process mining some gems of insight buried deeply amidst aimless wanderings of daily minutiae.
What did I learn about myself?
Here are some emergent themes from my most resonant activities.
Collaboration. Friendship. Community. Intimacy.
I reflect with fondness around the moments spent connecting with friends old and new, family and lovers.
Returning to a psychodynamic growth community after a few years away.
I’m about a month away from celebrating the fourth year of co-leading my men’s group. It has been invaluable in fostering leadership and growth.
Enrolling into Write Of Passage Cohort 9 was one of the year’s highlights.
Creativity. Learning. Music. Writing. Podcasting.
Starting a podcast, even if it didn’t get very far for now.
Making a concerted effort at writing in both Q1 through emails to my tiny list and returning to it in Q4 through Write Of Passage Cohort 9 with my first dozen or so publications. Humble beginnings on Substack and building momentum in the publishing habit – over and above the writing habit.
Ongoing study of copywriting and marketing to improve at the craft.
Consistent journaling for mental hygiene, capturing moments, working through challenging emotions and wrestling with ideas.
Collaborating musically with a friend earlier in the year and finally seeing it come to fruition in Q4. My first song to break a thousand streams. A modest but meaningful personal milestone.
Spending those spare moments before and between lessons learning the drums at the music school I teach at.
I also scratched a longstanding itch to put in a few solid months where I geeked out on chess tactics and developing board vision.
Going on a couple of tours performing with a band Curtis Clearsky and the Constellationz around British Columbia, in addition to opening up for the Wailers at the Victoria Ska & Reggae Festival.
For the second year in a row, the unique and rare privilege of jamming at Sarah McLachlan’s house and home studio as an opportunity derived from teaching at her music school.
Spirituality. Meditation. Contemplation. Growth. Therapy.
Discovering various teachers across different teachers while maintaining my own core practices. A return to more in-depth seated practice.
Allowing myself the opportunity to explore Vajrayana Buddhism (traktung khepa), practice jhana meditation (Rob Burbea, Leigh Brasington and Eric Lindo), reading and experimenting with Dr. Joe Dispenza’s work, and working with the Waking Up app alongside Insight Timer.
Explored some NARM (neuroaffective relational model) work with Melissa Knight Taylor, a meditation friend turned practitioner. A primer by the founders is Healing Developmental Trauma.
Finding and exploring the work of Brent Charleton and Bonnitta Roy in addition to revisiting John Vervaeke.
While these categories are admittedly sloppy and could be organized in any number of ways, I have only myself to please. “Good enough,” i say.
At the beginning of last year, I made a casual list of aspirations and I managed to get around to about half. My first reaction was actually quite positive, which perhaps speaks to my glass half-full kind of optimism.
These sorts of writings about the future were periodically sprinkled throughout. I also underestimated how often I turned to and scrawled on existential topics despite presently reporting a high level of subjective well-being. Either I’m bullshitting myself or there has been substantial growth (via diminishment) of interior dialogue around these lines of inquiry.
Summary
Upon considering the year ahead, I think what would make this a great year. In very rough outlines, if I simply made more music, published more writing, connected more deeply and frequently with loved ones, continued to deepen my spiritual practice, and set aside time to continue learning and growing, 2023 will have been a most successful year.
As for actionable takeaways, there are many systems you could consider but ultimately it is up to you to decide what is meaningful to track. Like any habit, start small and stay consistent.
A year packed with Tai Gems :)
How dope that you opened for the Wailers and jammed with Sarah McLachlan.
Indeed, wow Tai! Really amazed at how you managed to come out with this cohesive and useful review after such going so, so deep. Loved the meta parts talking about the process itself, it weaved and informed so perfectly what came next.
Glad to see it was such a valuable year in so many fronts, hope 2023 is even better!