2020, the year that was...

What an year 2020 has been, right? We spent the entire time sitting at home, like everyone else, and realized in the first month that whining about not being able to travel is nothing but a sign of our privilege, when millions others were struggling for their daily meal. So with whining quickly out of the door as one of the options to spend time sitting at home, like everyone else, I had to look for ways to cope with the enormous bandwidth that was now mine.

Work

Work was busy, but with the added dimension of making it work across large teams driving decisions and making progress while everyone was remote and dealing with their own challenges. I got a lot of learning this year, both from the work perspective and from an internal dialogue on what I'd rather spend my time with. I still love the team I work with, people continue to be as awesome as they always were, and I still learn a lot from them. I think I have been fairly successful in working between 930AM-6PM on most days even when we were working from home from March. All in all, I think this has been a good year! 

Life

In spite of sitting at home and doing nothing much, with no other distractions except picking on each other all day, the husband and I realized we've been pretty comfortable in each other's company, and I am super grateful for that. We quickly got into a routine which would give us enough time in each other's presence but still give us the mountains of space we've always needed for ourselves, both of which were absolutely required in a bizarre year like 2020. 

We moved homes, again, this one being our 5th one in the 4.5 years we've been in the US, our 9th one in the 15 years we've been together, and my 15th one since I moved out of my parents' home in 2002. So yeah, that's a lot of moves :-)

Workout

I think I hit a breakthrough in how I looked at workouts in Jan 2019, when I realized that the only way to be healthy was to show up consistently to working out. Since then, I have managed to be in the gym for at least 4 days per week, and have noticed tons of differences in myself - for once, I am able to sleep on time. No more lying in bed trying to fall asleep and hence reading till 2AM for me in both 2019 and 2020, when I was working out. Since I had to be up in the morning to get to the gym, failing which I'd end up paying a no-show fine, sleeping on time just happened. 

It is this area of my life that has been the most impacted in 2020, due to the COVID stay-at-home restrictions. With no gym between March-June 2020, my sleep went for a toss. As motivated as I was to workout, I realized I am not a self-starter and working out by myself in my carpeted apartment with the adjustable dumbbells and yoga mat was not exciting me, it just wasn't cutting it and was not comparable to what I'd been doing in the gym, and so I gave up totally. I hope to correct this in 2021. 

Ever since the gyms reopened in July till they closed again by mid-November in time for the second wave, I started CrossFit, working out in a gym in a group class setting, which I noticed works the best for me. I also noticed in 2020 that I am kinda addicted to the Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS), and hence started missing gym when there was no DOMS. For now, I think this is still a healthy addiction :-). 

TV 

As expected, in a year this bizarre, I had to rely on TV as a coping mechanism, especially in the early months when uncertainty at how folks in India were going to deal with the social distancing norms was eating me up a lot. I think I overdid my TV watching between mid-April to June-end, when I discovered Korean dramas. Korean dramas truly helped me sail through 2020, and with such amazing content to see, I always had something to watch on TV at the end of the day. I rediscovered binge-watching and falling in love with a foreign language/customs/content, and it has been fun so far. A quick look at my profile on MyDramaList told me that I have watched 40 dramas in 2020, with ~800 hours of TV. That is a LOT, but I needed this to get through 2020!

Books

There will be a whole post for how my book-reading was in 2020, but here's the short answer - am still pretty pleased with the content I consumed via books in 2020. There is a quality to the books I read and I hope to continue this into 2021. 

Spanish

One thing I am super grateful for in 2020 is Duolingo, the app that taught me Spanish. As of today, I have a 304 day streak on this app, which means I have logged in and taken a lesson on everyone of these days. To me, this signifies a commitment to learning, something I have trouble keeping up, in most cases. I am now confident that on our travels to a Spanish-speaking country, I can order my own food in a restaurant, make small talk with our guides, buy knick-knacks and maybe even understand stray conversation. We started getting serious about this on our trip to Costa Rica in Feb 2020, and have continued learning on the app ever since. 

Hikes/Outdoors

As the reality of working from home for the foreseeable future started sinking in, I kept on making plans to work out of a sunnier location for a few weeks, but never really acted on it. Once the gyms opened, I didn't want to miss the gym and hence working from California or Sedona was not a viable option. As Summer rolled in, there was no way I was going to miss hiking in the beautiful PNW so I could spend time elsewhere, coz Summer is why we all live here for the rest of the 9 months. 

Hiking is what we did - chugging along, with our masks on, finding hikes where there were not so many people, on to places on our list. Purely in the no. of hikes, this was an average year, with only 16 hikes done. But these hikes stand out for their quality. Most of them were lake hikes, almost all of them rated Difficult, with high elevation gains. 

Till end of August, we were training and preparing to through-hike The Enchantments and hence were picking up only difficult hikes. Once I reached Colchuck Lake and realized that I could never muster the mental strength to hike up Asgard Pass and so gave up the through-hike idea, we decided to use all this training towards Fall hikes and go see the golden larches. This year took me to some corners of the state I haven't been to, and I got to see how varied and gorgeous PNW is! 

I am still in love with PNW, and I still have trouble with the thought of moving away and not being able to hike around here or catch a view to the mountains (either Rainier or Baker) from a random corner of the city. 

Travel

This section gets an honorary mention in this post purely because of the no. of  trips I had to cancel in 2020. After returning from India in Jan (where I had to cancel a Sri Lanka trip because of a death in the family), we stole a mid-winter break to Feb 2020 returning right in time before everything got closed in March. We were supposed to fly to Cabo to celebrate a friend's 50th bday, which had to be canceled. I was working on a Galapagos + Easter island trip in May which had to be canceled too. I also had to cancel the trip and hotel booking for Manitoba Bay to go see the polar bears. Sigh. But, like I stated, whining about lost trips in 2020 is stupid, which we should all be glad to have a roof on our head and an otherwise happier life. 

Stuff to work on for 2021 

1. Work on motivating self to work out, even for 10-15 min every day in case of no gym. This has to be a habit and I should work on this
2. Scroll a bit less on the social media sites. I am only on Instagram (after quitting FB in Oct 2019), but reaching an average of 30 min per day on Instagram is not something to be proud of. I should not be opening the phone to check Instagram at all. 
3. Continue work on Duolingo - once I get comfortable enough in Spanish, I'd like to pick up French next.
4. Since the husband has plans that will push us to the next phase of our lives, I will work along with those plans to take me something that I am interested in, next. 

Why this penchant to monitor data/trends even in life? 

I have asked myself this questions over and over again - why am I so eager to count the activities I did. I certainly am not using this to boast about my life, but I realized this is for me to know the reality. I believe that it is super easy to write off an year as unproductive or bad, especially if the year is 2020, which had all the makings of a disaster right from the start. But if one gets to the personal level and looks at data, of the stuff done and learnt, I am pretty sure there is something to feel positive about. For me, tracking the no. of hikes I've been on or the books I've read is one way to feel positive about how my life has been in a given year, and it helps me set realistic goals on how to spend the next year. Hence, data matters :-)

And by the power vested in me by the data I've maintained, I pronounce 2020 as - Not too bad an year, personally. :-)