A Review of 2020
This blog is not currently high on my priority list but it is New Year's Eve so it seems right to make a post. 2020 has been an unforgettable year for many negative reasons. So many of my and my family's routines were flipped on their heads. But there were many key things that helped me keep my head above a lot of the confusion and unknowns.
My Bullet Journal: By nature, I’m a very disorganized person. Disorganization fed my procrastination which got me into a lot of frustrating and difficult situations throughout my life. In 2019, at the age of 40, I decided to take a look around and see if anyone had any helpful tips and tools. This may seem like super basic stuff to most people but I was really coming from a place of not knowing even where to begin. After asking some questions online, I realized I needed some kind of dayplanner calendar to-do-list system. I tried a couple but they were all a bit too stiff and rigid for my taste. I started reading posts where people were discussing the Bullet Journal method and that led me to this Youtube video by Liam Dryden. It immediately clicked for me and I spent the remaining months of 2019 experimenting with my journal and started to get organized. 2020 came and I was ready to go with my journal. I was in no way 100% consistent; I definitely missed some days along the way, but I stuck with it and it had a dramatic and positive impact on my year. Covid-19 or no Covid-19, I would not have been able to start up this website and keep track of all the different lessons and schedules without my trusty Bullet Journal. Is it the best solution for keeping your life organized? I don't know. I don't have much experience with other organizational tools but I can say this is one of the good ones. I can also recommend the book, The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll, for anyone who wants to know more after watching the video, posted above.
Morning Bible and Oswald Chambers Time: I spent most of my mornings, in 2020, reading through the New Testament and Psalm 119 in my Bible. I would also use my mornings to read a page from Oswald Chambers' book, My Utmost for His Highest. If I was calm and patient with people on any particular day, it was because I spent my morning reading like this.
Online Go Sessions With Friends: Like most everyone else, I was introduced to Zoom and Zoom meetings in 2020. My friends and I were able to stay in touch and play online Go with a little help from Zoom and OGS. It will never replace the real deal, playing face-to-face, but it was another major factor to me keeping my sanity this year.
Teaching Go: Whether it was offering free lessons to random people on Reddit or introducing my all-of-a-sudden-having-too-much-free-time-on-their-hands friends or taking the big step to start this website, it has been quite beneficial to my mental well-being to teach others the game of Go. I especially enjoy putting the lesson plans together for my new students. It's quite a challenge as each of my students is coming to their lessons from a different place, geographically but also mentally and emotionally. What I mean by mentally and emotionally is, all of my students are quite busy with so many different responsibilities and then you top things off with the new tensions of this year. I have come to enjoy the challenge of taking all that into consideration during my lesson planning. I am finding it a little difficult to explain here but it has something to do with several of my students stating that the lessons had a therapeutic quality to them. Some find Go to be an outlet for their creativity while others find it to be a much-needed daily mental exercise. I think that's why they describe the lessons as having a therapeutic quality and I try to be sensitive to that in preparing for each of their lessons.
Getting Back Into Art: Drawing and Sketching has been a big part of my life, except for when I forget to remember how big a part of my life it is, and I decided to pick up some new tools this year. One of them was the Wacom Intuos Graphic Drawing Tablet to touch up this website a bit. (Trust me, I know there is even more touching up needed) Combining a simple, entry-level drawing tablet with some really cool free software, Medibang, has been perfect to get my creative juices flowing again.
So, this post mentions a review of 2020. I guess it turned out to be more about positive things that got me through this really challenging time. The things listed above didn't make the confusion and unknowns of this year magically disappear but, I found, they greatly helped me to have a more positive attitude towards the day and the future.
There are several other things I wanted to add to this list but they are all projects that are currently in the planning phase for 2021. Currently, I can only say that they are related to this site and Go and should be of interest to many of my current and future students. Even though they are future projects, the act of planning for future projects has been another big positive change in my life.
Happy New Year to all!
Peace.
- REVERSER