In March 2020, the government announced a lockdown. No one allows to go out except for shopping, and everyone must work from home. First of all, despite of the hard situation for every business, I was lucky that I didn’t get laid off and my salary remained untouched.
After a few days of passing time at home, playing video games, and watching movies, I felt guilty that I’m not as productive as I should be and I’m not using my time efficiently. I thought it’s better to take up some new skills to kill the time in a worthwhile way. After having a few beers, I wrote down a list of activities/skills that I’ve always wanted to do but I couldn’t find time to start them.
Here is the list of things that I up with.
Reading more books, especially before going to bed (or maybe in bed)
The key point here was to make it a habit to read a book even one page before I go to sleep. Apparently, I’ve failed, because I’ve done that only for a couple of weeks. But it doesn’t really matter because the books that I read were excellent.
Wherever you go there you are, is an amazing book about meditation,
Listened to the audiobook of the Greenlights, an autobiography from Mattew McCounghy, with his own voice
Listened to the audiobook of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Siddhartha from Hermann Hesse
I also abandoned Why We Sleep, The wisdom of insecurity, and The art of happiness
Write more on my blog
Although I’m a terrible writer, I’d like to improve myself in this area by writing more. I’ve published a few articles since last year, but honestly, I’m not satisfied with the result in terms of quantity and quality. The reason maybe is that I’m a little perfectionist when it comes to publishing something for the public. It could be an article, a picture, or a project. But the thing is, my blog has only a few readers which all are my friends. Mahdi and Sajjad are always pushing me to write, and Irish who reads and fix my mistakes (I call her personal editor :D), and other friends also give me feedbacks which I’m grateful for.
But for the sake of getting better at writing, and give my friends more headaches, I will write more.
Write on my journal regularly
I’ve been writing in my journal for a few years, but I decided to write in English. Actually, the result was pretty good, I’ve written a lot in my notebook. Maybe because no one is going to read them, I can write freely whatever I want, without getting nervous about the language, grammar, or the topic. It also helped me to know myself better and express myself in any way that I want by putting my thoughts on paper.
Scuba Diving
Scuba diving had been one of my goals ever since I learned how to swim and I could achieve it in the strangest year of my life.
Make new friends
Maybe it is strange that I put this on my list, but as someone who lives in a foreign country, I needed to have some friends. Fortunately, I found some new friends, even though the pandemic doesn’t allow us to have more interaction with each other, but still, we are in touch via the Internet. Another good point is that I could keep my old friends and in some cases, we are getting closer, even though we are thousands of miles apart.
Meditation
I tried, got bored, didn’t continue. That’s all.
Lucid dreaming
I read about lucid dreaming on reddit and Why We Sleep, and I thought how amazing it could be to control your dreams. There are some exercises about how to experience lucid dreaming which is starting to write down your dreams. After a couple of weeks, I had one lucid dream. Although, before I could control my dream I had woken up, but, I was so excited that I had experienced it. After that, I stopped writing my dreams and as a result, I haven’t experienced it again.
Jugging and going to the gym regularly
Honestly, I found the gym boring, because there was no one to talk to and interact with. but I’m going jogging almost 2 or 3 times a week. So I count it as a success.
Start and Finish at least one side-project
The keyword here is TO FINISH. I’ve started many projects in my life, but I have never finished any of them. My goal was to start a project and take it to a place that I can present it to others. As you may guess, I couldn’t do that till now, but I’m still working on it.
Improve my handwriting
Journaling helped me to get better at handwriting, even though I didn’t practice properly. At least I can read my own handwriting easier than before.
Summary
A few days ago, I was depressed that I haven’t done anything productive since last year, but when I started to write this, I realized it wasn’t that bad. Maybe the outcome is not that much that I can show to anyone or use them in daily basis, but it added so much to me. At least now, I know I don’t like going to the empty gym or doing meditation, and for achieving your goal you don’t need to be in your best shape or best year, you can do it whenever you feel and however you want. Even if I add up the video games that I played, the movies that I watched, the kinds of music that I listened to, and the foods that I cooked, I can count last year as a success.
Now I’m less depressed.