Proposing on a mountain. Buying a house. Dealing with government loans, regulations and protocol. Handling multiple bosses. Getting married.
That was a succinct summary of 2023 for me. A year of hardcore adulting. This year, I broke and crossed so many milestones that I never imagined I’d accomplish – ever. Would I have imagined that I would marry my girlfriend AND buy a house within the same year? (No, obviously, but somehow I did it).
So no wonder I didn’t have time to blog this year.
A year as normal as ever
If 2022 was the year of slowly getting back to normal, then this year meant understanding what ‘normal’ meant.
Normal means staying two-and-a-half years (as of Dec 2023) in full-time, paid employment. My company treats me well and the renumeration is decent. I get to choose my work challenges. It doesn’t seem to get any better than this.
Normal means running competitively again. Covid put a halt on races, but this year Singapore’s amateur running scene has fully recovered. Team Dinosaur is probably too old to compete strongly. But I do relish the idea of joining a race on my own and taking on younger runners.
Finally, normal means picking and choosing the best things that happened during the pandemic and leaving the rest behind. These things continued: online calligraphy courses on Zoom with my based-in-China teacher, and building deeper friendships with colleagues from my Covid frontline days. What I left behind: early morning runs, cycling, getting food by delivery apps.
Normal also means not writing.
Writing, blogging and struggling
The biggest disappointment this year is self-evident in this post: my writing output has tapered off to zero.
This coincided with the end of the pandemic in 2022. Lockdowns, work-from-home days and travel restrictions meant that 2020-2021 was a productive period for fiction-writing. But since I didn’t travel, this blog has been languishing.
Travel has rebounded, and this year I was hiking in Taiwan, Malaysia and Ireland. Yet I’m not writing, or blogging. Personal life, work and a desire to live life to the maximum has got in the way.
I also look at many of the travel writers and bloggers whom I’ve idolised over the years. Some of them have gone silent. Others have refocused their content on tours or have become remote work platforms.
It seems amazing that writers whose sole purpose was to share how to travel can branch out into multiple domains and provide insight into life. It circles back to questions about this blog: do I specialise in content, or do I branch out? Is blogging even relevant?
These are questions I ask myself too. This time, I will give until end-2024 to figure it out once and for all.
What to be thankful for
Putting aside all the existential angst over writing, there was plenty to be thankful for this year.
This year, I summited four mountains: three of them over 3000m in Taiwan, and Gunung Chamah, a monster mountain in Malaysia. At the summit of one of them, I proposed to my girlfriend.
This year, I took a long-awaited family trip to attend my sister’s graduation in Cork, Ireland. Travelling Europe after almost a decade was a pleasure. Hiking in rural Ireland was a different level of difficult, but the scenery was stunning. Maybe a blog post will follow.
Then, two weeks after returning, I got married.
Also, in 2023, my now-wife and I bought a humble HDB flat. This is the first home I’ve owned, and it feels good that it was affordable and decent in an era of high housing prices. It’s unimaginable, during the long hours on the Covid frontline or in Lebanon, that I would buy property in Singapore to settle down.
There were many milestones – exceeding expectations in my calligraphy practice, getting a promotion, attending my first-ever church camp – and smaller things too numerous to mention. It has been quite a groundbreaking year.
And as usual, my standout books for a huge year:
- Elder Race, Adrian Tchaikowsky
- Haven, Emma Donoghue
- Kopi Dulu, Mark Eveleigh
- Agatha of Little Neon, Claire Luchette
- Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang, James Millward
- High Caucasus, Tom Parfitt
Here’s to a better 2024!