Less than 2 weeks until the end of the year – and, with that, the end of my 365 daily writing challenge. That means there’s still time for a recap. Since I already have a post for every day of 2021, I decided to try a monthly recap, which means there will be one post for each month, for the next 12 days. It won’t have any specific format, some recaps may be shorter than others, because less happened during those months. Or nothing really relevant happened. At the same time, some months may get more attention, because they were more eventful. Or I just liked them more.
How Was January?
In hindsight, it was a month of preparation. I was still considering to continue living in Spain, but some research for moving somewhere else already began. Didn’t have any specific target, nor did I know for sure I would be able to find another place, but something started to feel off.
Also, a lot of the stuff I did in the previous year got to be processed that month. I had time to look back at – and internalize – some of the most important experiences of 2019. Obviously, a lot of this was about the clusterfuck that became the Covid-19 phenomenon. One of the articles I wrote in January about how a virus killed the modern state, is becoming eerily realistic. Back then, I could only grasp some tendencies, but now, after almost a year, these tendencies are taking shape. We have already crypto cities, as an alternative to the totalitarian stance that’s infecting the so called civilized world, while places considered traditionally “free”, like Canada, or Australia, are deep into to the mud of authoritarianism.
I also wrote about my fitness habits in 2019, including the great experience on Camino de Santiago, which ended up with me weighing less by more than 8 kilos. Happy to report that, even a couple of these kilos have been added back again, the main shape is staying the same, even after almost a year. Keeping the habits of walking around 10km / day, and short, but consistent yoga sessions in the morning, seems to be working perfectly.
January was also the month in which I started to part ways with social media. It was a slow process, which wasn’t complete until March, when I left Facebook for good. I didn’t rage quit, on the contrary, I left in silence, but not before writing here about the results of a 3 months long experiments in promoting blog content on Facebook and Instagram.
It was also a month with a lot of time allocated to my learning to play the guitar experiment. In hindsight, a lot of progress happened in that period. I still play the guitar (almost every day), but I’m not that immersed in it as I was in January.
If I would have to put January in a single word, it would be “recovery”. If I would have to put it in a sentence, it would be “I started to slowly recover after a crazy, deeply disturbing year”.
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
