I always conclude my year-in-review posts with a summary of some important lessons that I have learned in the past year. 2019 was pretty tame, so I didn't learn anything life-changing, but on a positive note, that meant that it was a better year than some because nothing dramatically negative happened to teach me anything incredible. Below are some basic life lessons, two history fun facts, some cultural commentary, and assorted other things I've learned.
1. I learned how to drastically reduce my online activity. Basically, the Rescue Time app gave me the opportunity to enter into a competition with myself. How little time can I spend on Twitter? What will my productivity percentage be today? This makes me more mindful of how I spend my time, creates incentive for me to get in and out of websites quickly, and makes it possible for me to do other projects on the laptop with deeper focus and less distraction.
2. My pastor's wife knows me very well. She gave me this sticker for my laptop, and since I write slice-of-life stories inspired by the people and things around me, it really couldn't be more accurate.
3. I now realize that I owe many of my greatest accomplishments and joys in life to my decision in 2013 to never, ever own a smartphone. I cannot imagine my life without the reflections, daydreams, and moral choices that I made during the silent and undisturbed moments of my life. If I had owned a smartphone, I would have looked at it every morning as soon as I woke up, but without one, I did my most important thinking before I even started the day. I laid the foundation for my life in quiet, reflective moments, uninterrupted by screens.
4. I learned how rewarding it can be to forego valid opportunities to tell someone about past hurt that they never acknowledged. Since I am justice-oriented and lack the capacity to forget things, I have never been good at forgiving people. Despite this, I have learned a lot about mercy this year.
5. Speaking of which, I learned that "mercy" is a much better word to use about forgiveness than "grace." Grace involves generous self-giving, while mercy is a matter of withholding from someone the consequences that they have rightfully earned. Grace and mercy are both necessary and important parts of forgiveness, but I have found that it is much easier for me to extend grace after I have framed forgiveness as a process of choosing mercy. I am relinquishing the right to make the other person pay, and mercy validates the reality of the hurt that I have experienced and the reality of my choice.
6. I learned that I don't like Mary Poppins nearly as much as I thought I did. Apparently, I remembered a mental mash-up of the highlights and forgot all of the boring parts. It was a revelation to sit through it again and get bored, and I also realized that the last time I watched this movie was over ten years ago.
7. Even though the rest of the culture has degraded, YouTube comments have somehow gotten better over the past decade. I don't know when they improved, since I religiously avoided looking at them for years, but I discovered this year that despite the occasional spam and vulgarity, many comments are personal or reflective. People will write about what a song means to them, or they'll share funny thoughts like, "This song smells like a hotel lobby at 2 AM." I'm not sure if YouTube has gotten more aggressive about policing harmful comments or if people have just learned more about Internet etiquette, but it was nice to learn that one element of culture has improved.
8. Winston Churchill's mother was an American debutante who came to England in search of a husband. The future of civilization depended on this woman's husband-hunting activities, and that is an incredibly overwhelming thought.
9. I also learned that because a window in C.S. Lewis's childhood home looked out at the Belfast shipyards, he and his brother witnessed the construction of the Titanic. This is much less dramatic than the previous fact, but I'm always intrigued to learn about ways that unrelated parts of history intersect.
10. I learned how to help someone else declutter. In 2018, I learned how to purge many of my own belongings, and as I unpacked boxes in our new house this past summer, I learned persuasive techniques for convincing my mom to let go of things.
11. I learned that a significant contributor to my health issues is exposure to EMF (electro-magnetic fields). Wifi, phones, sound systems, and other electronics significantly increase my anxiety, trigger physical aches and pains, and zap me of energy. I now understand why my neck and jaw hurt after I talk on the phone, why I always feel worse at church, and why being in a big crowd always makes me feel terrible.
12. I learned a ton of new things about one of my fictional characters. He's been around since early 2012, but he took center-stage this year and kept surprising me with new details about his backstory and inner life. This has enriched my stories and given me a much greater love and sympathy for real people who are like him.
13. I now better understand the biological traits and common social dynamics of Highly Sensitive People. I am an HSP, which means that my neurological system is wired to be particularly sensitive to my inner world, other people, and my surroundings. This hyper-awareness is an inborn trait with a number of different implications for life, and I learned more about HSPs by reading Elaine Aron's groundbreaking work from the late nineties. There were a number of things that I didn't care for about her books, so I'm not endorsing them, but the information that I learned made it worth my time to read them.
14. I learned how to outline or draft story ideas to come back to later instead of waiting until I have time for a whole project. I hugely boosted my creative output this way, and even though I have a lot of unfinished stories waiting for attention, I much prefer this to forgetting ideas that I've never had time for.
15. The Lord of the Rings movies are amazingly well-paced. I always appreciated this before, but now that I have seen the movies in theaters and had to plan bathroom breaks, I have a whole new awareness of how gripping these stories are. Even in the extended editions, there is no dead time.
16. When I saw these instructions at a Baby Boomer wedding, I realized that there is no generational gap with technology anymore. It's just everyone else and me. However, even though I was probably the only guest who didn't own a smartphone, a stranger still came all the way across the room to enlist me as a young person to help them.
17. I have learned how to digitally declutter. I now have twenty browser bookmarks instead of hundreds, and have reduced my Goodreads to-read list by 250+ titles. Now that I have reduced my list to a manageable number, I plan to get through most of these books in 2020.
18. It appears that I can provide valuable advice to parents. Since I have exactly zero children, I don't go around offering parenting advice to people, but sometimes coworker conversations unfold in that direction. I'm glad that people trust me to listen to them sympathetically and appreciate my input.
19. I realized that one of the biggest surprises of the decade is that I now like superheroes. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising, given how much superhero-related entertainment expanded in the 2010s, but I never imagined how much I would love Captain America, Wonder Woman, and the Flash, or that this would become a main genre of interest for me. I'm excited to see what new surprises and interests the 2020s will hold!
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