For a bit more context, you can read my complete plan for 2022 in this article.

February is a notoriously short month for it is lacking a few days. Reaching all of my goals therefore was somewhat of a challenge. Adding to that, I also spent 28% of this month abroad for our annual family skiing trip, which made it even more challenging. All in all, it was not my best month ever, but before I’ll bore you with all my silly excuse, I’ll just show you what I’ve actually managed to do in February.

Cultural

  • ✅ 4/4 books read a month
    • ⚪ 7/40 books in total a year
    • ⚪ 2/10 books by female authors a year
    • ⚪ 1/5 books by African authors a year
    • ⚪ 0/5 books by Asian authors a year
    • ⚪ 0/5 books by South America authors a year
  • ⚪ 0/1 generative art works published
  • ❌ 0/1 essays written
  • ❌ 2/4 articles published on the blog
  • ✅ 1/1 spoken word piece written for Radio Naodors
  • ❌ 2/4 soups made this month
  • ⚪ 4/50 soups this year

Made some good progress on my reading goals. And I very much enjoyed it! Especially reading the African novel ‘A man of the people‘ by the Nigerian novelist, poet, and former professor at Brown University Chinua Achebe. I’m very glad I added the diversity challenges to my reading goal because it really is a joy to read books that maybe I would not have picked up if it wasn’t for this challenge.

Furthermore, I’ve made two new soup recipes this month. And to be honest, I think that two soups a month is a better objective than making 4 soups a month. Because I want it to be a fun challenge. It’s not a challenge to push myself or push my limits, it’s just a fun challenge. And so far, my natural limit seems to be two soups per month. So that is good then. I’ll just adjust this goal to making 24 soups/year and 2 soups/month.

Lastly, I started the Instagram account Sabbatical Jaer Visuals where I publish my generative art experiments. I’m just posting some doodles and experiments there. I think it’s a nice way to keep track of my progress. I’ve also come up with a couple of ideas for generative art collections that I want to create at a later stage. Oh, btw, for those who don’t know what generative art is, it’s basically writing algorithms that generate interesting visuals as an output. Preferable with an element of randomness in the code, so that you can say that the computer has had a large part in ‘generating’ the art.

Physical

Running

  • ❌ 0/80KM a month

Swimming

  • Have not been to too many swimming lessons this month. No comment or reflection on that to be honest. Althought I have to say that I’m looking forward to swimming in the sea again!

Cycling

  • ✅ 179/160KM a month
  • ⚪ 379/2000KM a year
  • ⚪ Ride the perimeter of Malta in one day.

Hmm… I didn’t run any KMs this month. I have plenty of semi-valid excuses for that (COVID, injury, eeh.. just not motivation?). It’s pretty bad. Especially because I told myself at the end of January that I had to run more! But I actually ended up running less…

Anyway… this month I came up with an ingenious plan to trick myself into running more! This plan worked really well last year. I signed up for two runs in the foreseeable future. On the 19th of March (if I’ll be out of quarantine ??) I’ll be running the Dingli Cliffs 10K run and on the 24th of April, I’ll be running the Valletta half marathon (simultaneously with my youngest sister who will be running the half marathon of Enschede at that moment 🙂 ).

Now that I have signed up for those runs (and paid for it lol), I have no choice but to train for them. A great example of delegating discipline. I’ll also be buying new running shoes this week because for some reason my current running shoes are 3 sizes too big? I have no idea how that happened.

My Cycling goals have been reached. No surprise there. Cycling is awesome. In total I managed to reach 26 hours of activity on Strava for the 28 days of February, so that still is almost 1h a day on average. Not as bleak as I expected at all! But yeah, I’ll definitely try to run more in March. Well, I have to do it now… 🙂

Spiritual

  • ✅ 1/1 monthly reflection document
  • ❌ 0/2 church visits
  • ✅ 4/4 individual walks

Hmm, I ended up failing the visit-the-church challenge. Quite dissapointing. I was looking forward to going to the church so much, but ended up not doing it. Why? No idea. I think, like I stated in my last reflection document, that it’s because it’s just simply not ‘in my system’ yet. But I’m pretty positive that in March I’ll be going to church a few times! This is because I’m currently fasting for Lent, which is quite a spiritual experience. I’ve already noticed that suppressing my desires helps me to zoom out a bit and to reflect and think about certain things a bit more. I’ll maybe write a separate article on that later. But a logical extension of that heightened spirituality seems to be to visit the church.

Oh, there is one last thing I want to mention regarding this topic! I recently started ‘micro journaling’. It’s basically writing tweets to myself in the notes app on my phone. It’s a lot of fun. I started doing it after I deleted all social media apps from my phone for the 23542nd time in my life. The wonderful Youtube algorithm recommended this youtube video to me about micro journaling and I have to say, it works really well! Instead of opening social media apps, I just open my notes app and write various random thoughts down. It’s quite interesting to look back at it after a few days and see so many interesting patterns that I would not have noticed otherwise.

Charitas

  • ✅ Clean a beach/section of Malta every month
  • ⚪ Promoting darkness and fighting light pollution

Every Sunday, we go for a hike (check out our ‘hiking the perimeter of Malta‘-challenge) and we bring some binbags and just simply collect the trash we find along the way. It’s quite a fun activity, it almost becomes a game to find the next piece of trash.

Thoughts?

So this was my big end-of-the-month reflection document! What do you think of it? Does it make sense? Would you like me to dive into more detail by sharing more statistics and more detailed reflections? I tried to make it into a compact document that is easy to go through, but let me know if you have any suggestions/advice/tips to share with me for the next month!