Dragon Year Review

A very quickly drawn (not finished) attempt at a Chinese Dragon.

Time to take a look at how the Year of the Dragon went.

Completed number goals for sword (weapon) form and the number of blogs posted. I didn’t blog every week but for the first time since being on the I Ho Chuan team I have at least completed 52 blog posts in a year.

The number of kilometres came close but I didn’t achieve the 1609 that was the goal. This is the first year that I haven’t reached the goal number. That’s the difference that not wearing my smart-watch in class made. I will have to take action to make it work in years to come.

A small amount of progress was made on the Greatcoat project early in the year but the fall and winter, when I usually get my sewing done,  was not successful. So this goal is being carried over to the Year of the Snake.

While I didn’t “complete” the decluttering of my life I feel like I made solid progress on this goal. The first pass was done on the entire main floor. The first pass has started on the basement. I also made some big decisions regarding decluttering some important non-physical things from my life, and the relief of stress has been huge! I still keep finding areas of my life that I didn’t realize these things had been adversely affecting.

There was much learning about decluttering, physically and otherwise. I still have more books to finish and read, and the push for the digital declutter has not started yet. So, decluttering my life will also be carried into the Year of the Snake.

Something unexpected that happened: I’ve been listening to podcasts and reading books (very slowly) by Cal Newport and one of the things he mentions quite often is to “do fewer things… at a time”. He often talks about how you can get things done faster and with better quality when you do this. With the end of the Year of the Dragon rapidly approaching I made the decision to focus on getting a few of my goals accomplished rather than continuing to press for all of them. I didn’t expect to notice the things I did by focusing on my weapon form as part of the idea of “doing fewer things”. I only did that because I would rather accomplish something instead of nothing. Yet it’s been really interesting. Sword is on my mind more, and I suspect my subconscious is playing with it a bit more as a result. The numbers were easier to increase, I wasn’t as distracted by the other goals, and not as scattered either. I found it strangely easier to stay motivated working on fewer things rather than the daunting task of all the others with it at the same time. Is this perhaps the right approach to use moving forward? I don’t know, but it feels like it was working when all the years before didn’t. There were variables however. For example, I hadn’t done the declutter to remove mediocrity from my surroundings in previous years either. I definitely feel that the declutter was one of the biggest and best things I could have done (started) for my Kung Fu… and my life. Wish I’d done it sooner.

Numbers:

Pushups: 4137

Situps: 3122

Weapon Form: 1002

Hand Form: 399

Random Acts of Kindness: 129

Sparring: 260

Kilometres: 1464

Memorize “Mastery”: Nothing to report

Nurture Relationships: Nothing to report

Blogging: 52

Declutter my life: No progress since last blog

Greatcoat project: No progress since last blog