2021

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash ** No sooner than the year begins does it seemingly end, the flight of time - ponderously slow in the moment - somehow seemingly fast when the view is backward, over its long arch. It truly is a trick of time. As 2020 morphed into 2021, what thoughts I had came together around Rebuilding Better, the premise being that 2020 had been a year of significant disruption - and deconstruction - with 2021 a fresh chance to begin again, to put together what was broken in a better way with twelve objectives concretely describing that for me. Now that 2021 has morphed into 2022, it feels like a good time to revisit all that, so here goes. ...

It’s that time of the year again where I reflect on my reading over the course of the year. My previous attempts are linked here. \\\* I have a litany of reasons to give for the paltry return of fourteen books completed this year, as big a drop as could be from the twenty-three I put way with consummate ease last year, chief of which was the welcome disruption L brought to our lives this year and all that came with it. The chief effect of that was a a significant number of unread books, all the free time I had in the latter part of the year being eighty minutes each day on the bus to and from work on work days. The vast majority were thus audiobooks, the experience of which I tried to improve by taking copious notes in Notion. Of the lot, a few stood out for various reasons. I plan on re-reading a few in hard copy in the near future, real life permitting. So here goes: ...

Rodin’s Le Penseur. Image from the US National Gallery of Art ** When I set about thinking about the year of being forty, it seemed a no-brainer that it would be centred around delving deeper. The premise was that as the worst kind of failure is one of depth, actively looking to ensure I had depth in all critical aspects of my life was key as I came into my decade of being forty something. As to why I think failures of depth are the most critical, I think that both the one who fails and the one who is failed are left with the lingering after taste of what might have been. For one, the chance of a lifetime disappears before it even begins. For the other the time and energy expended/ invested ends up being for nothing. Both face the opportunity costs, lost irretrievably. For the year of being forty-one, rebuild better was the key, given COVID and how it had intervened specifically in my life with regards to a new job. ...

Back in May of 2020, Nassim Nicholas Taleb tweeted about the pandemic - and the disruptive forces it brought to bear on the world we knew - being a trigger for one to do a total reset and adapt. For better or for worse, we all have had to reset through 2020. When I started thinking about 2021, the sense of evolving past the reset into something new was hard to shake. As such for me, 2021 feels like a year in which I need to focus on Rebuilding, but doing it Better. ...