As we are approaching the end of another circle our planet will complete around the Sun, I cannot help but join the rest of the humans inhabiting our “pale blue dot” in recapping what has happened in the past 365 days, how that compared to my plans and what I should hope to achieve in the next available slot.

If I were to give a TL;DR description of this year, I would say it was a year of (re)definition. I redefined who I am, what I value in life and how I want to work towards achieving my goals. I discovered things that were hidden in plain sight. Those helped me define a sustainable pace for living the life of a father, son, knowledge worker, athlete, and all the alter egos that inhibit me throughout my life.

I entered the year feeling lost. 2022 left me shattered physically and mentally. To “help” the situation, January started with a big scare. I became the victim of identity theft. Following up with various banks, the police and different softwares just to make sure that everyone knows that I am how I am, is an experience I hope I would never employ my time with again. It took some weeks and effort to recover from the mental imprint that left on me and my family.

At the same time, my personal life was not going well. I was questioning whether I was the person I really thought I was. Did I lie to everyone and, most importantly, myself? Was I projecting a false image onto my loved ones and they, in return, reflected that back to me? Tough questions to which me and my loved ones managed to find some answers.

To spare you the details of my imperfections and cut to the chase, getting out of that whole was a long process that continues to this day. It constitutes of a lot of conversing, reflection and self-honesty. Also patience, active listening, compromise, “taking the high road” and a love deeper than any word or act can unearth.

The ascension of my life’s sinusoid came due to my love for working out. To those who know me, it would not come as a surprise to hear that I’m obsessed with physical activity. It is my outlet during times of distress and has helped me numerous times in the past. This time was no different. Call it “luck favours the prepared”, “seek and you will find” or whatever you like.

While browsing aimlessly YouTube one evening, procrastinating as I do, I found a video referring to Calimove. These German machines have been putting up great content for years. I have been applying their practises on the playground just as long. Never did I consider, though, that I should support them financially by purchasing one of their programs. As the n-th attempt of trying to address the pain in my body through stretches, I decided to buy their mobility program.

As part of the purchase, I was offered to buy their calisthenics program. In the past years I had been doing a mix of training disciplines where calisthenics was just an ingredient. Hence, this offer sounded dull. Yet, I felt that I needed structure. Most importantly I wanted a process that was crafted by someone more knowledgeable than me. I embraced the change and purchased all programs. Furthermore, I deliberately went one level of difficulty below what I knew I was capable of. The aim was to build myself from the ground up, the way Calimove would do it. I wanted to learn how badly I was broken and how to live with my new self.

I was diligent and honest in the process. I skipped no workouts, did what the program said, and kept track of my progress. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months. Consistency was paying off. As I’m writing these words, I am in the last program level of the calisthenics program (I started from level 3 and now I’m on level 5). I have strength, mobility and, most importantly, confidence. As a byproduct of my hard work, I gained skills I thought were no accessible to me anymore.

Once physical balance started getting restored, other parts of my life began aligning as a result. First came the realization of my unsustainable work-life pace. I was delivering my child to the public institution, running after public transport, hurrying to go to the office, feeling the need to move as many “mountains” as I could. That was followed by a travel back home whose aim was to beat the traffic just to get that glorious hour of training. Just before my family responsibilities came knocking on my door.

This wasn’t my tempo and that was shown to me through burnout, being prone to colds and inconsistent heart rate readings (yes, it’s an Apple Watch but at least the deltas are consistent). I needed a change. A practice that I adopted was working from home once a day and starting the working day from home every day. This way of “easing into” the day, being outside of the matrix that the rest of the workers plug into every day is very liberating. It gives me the control, the slow tempo, the time to breath I so desperately needed, while keeping me productive and available to my colleagues.

As a by-product of my Monday work from home days, I get to do long deep work windows. One thing lead another, and one day I forgot to eat until 16:00. For reference, I’ve been practising intermittent fasting for some years. However, the fight to keep hunger at bay was a conscious one. With all that work taking up my mental capacity and my ability to tell my brain that being hungry is ok, I realized a new opportunity had presented itself - controlling how much food ingest on a daily basis.

I understand that food can be viewed as fuel and as a way to socialize. Also, cultures impose certain eating and drinking habits on the people that comprise them. Taking that into account, I decided to limit my feeding window 5 hours. That felt the most sustainable and best suited to my lifestyle. A larger window didn’t seem to exhibit the gains I was after - significantly lower heart rate, ability to do deep work for extended periods of time. A smaller window forced me to stuff myself continuously for 3 hours which felt uncomfortable.

I need more empirical data on this diet experiment but one thing’s for certain - I’m definitely going to experiment more.

Another hardship that kept on rearing its ugly head in the past year was the many examples of dysfunctional families that I saw around me. One by one, people who I loved shared that they are struggling or have thrown in the towel with regards to their better half. It felt like a pandemic that was coming for me. Through conversation I discovered the shortcomings of these relationships and doubled down on them in my personal life. The hope was that I could discover problems early and address them before they manifest into something maleficent. The results look promising so far but as I mentioned earlier - this is a journey.

The last noteworthy point for this year was my resumption of concert going. Being the father of a young child and going out feels irresponsible to me. Especially, when my child is one that doesn’t like to sleep. That being said, metal music is something I hold dear to my heart. As much as it can be seen as aggressive (which at times it is) and pure noise (which at times it definitely is), it is very liberating. I played music in my past and appreciate the time and energy that goes into crafting a soundscape. So it felt great to go to gigs again. I felt the energy, I jumped on people and found new friends in the pit, even for the night. More importantly, my physical shape, allowed me to be as active at the concerts as I was when I was half my age. That speaks volumes to me.

In closing, this was a difficult but a fulfilling year. I hope anyone reading this can say at least that for theirs.