2020: Some good things

2020 was hard, no question about it. Jotting down my reflections became long and unruly. So right now I simply want to record some good things that came in the spaces in between.

Sabbatical

Early this year I'd decided to leave my role at Google. Though I didn’t know what exactly I wanted to do, I knew that I wanted to take some time off first. My leave of absence started just before the stay-at-home orders in the bay area. We made a refreshing family trip to Hawaii, and then I had to cancel the rest of my very exciting plans. As those first few months progressed, I decided I wanted more time off.

I officially left Google in the middle of the year and decided to go on sabbatical. I am well aware of the luxury I have to take this type of time. But for me, it was the right thing to do. After chatting with a few people, I learned that this is also a totally normal thing to do! Though their advice usually aligned with the before times.

Either way, it’s given me time and space to do more of the rest of this list.

Time with my daughter

The largest chunk of my time is now spent with my daughter. We play, we laugh, and we explore all the little things around us. Every day is a delight. At this point in her life, I’ve spent more time at home than in an office. Though she won't remember this when she's older, I will cherish it. I believe that in some immeasurable way we are more deeply connected than we would have been otherwise.

Filling up my notebooks

I occasionally journal or sketch in various random notebooks floating around. Most of the time months go by before I add anything. But this year I started finishing each and every one of them. Notebooks I started a decade ago with reams of empty paper were soon filled with ink to the brim. Watching them stack up was supremely satisfying.

A good chunk of that came from writing morning pages. I also just wrote when I felt like it and just sketched whatever I saw around me: mostly lamps, soda cans, tissue boxes, headphones, and the like. The theme is pretty clear 😆

Watercolors

When my daughter was born I bought a watercolor set. In the many hours of the day she slept, I’d hoped to learn how to paint during my parental leave. In those three months, I only filled two sheets with really rough attempts. This year I’ve had many more attempts at the brush. A few I am happy enough with to put up on my wall.

I also bought a nice set of markers to make quick colorful sketches. Sketching and painting are now an important part of how I spend my time.

Cooking

Lots of new recipes were attempted. Some great, some ok. We had to replace our toaster oven, upgraded our blender, and the instant pot became a new friend. My wife and I can now cook two or three times as many things as we did when the year started. It’s become a new creative outlet for both of us.

Learning from emotions

This has been a long journey, and will always remain one. More than ever before, I can step back from my emotions and understand where they are stemming from. I also understand and appreciate myself much more now as just another human being, a unique combination of experiences and predispositions.

In a recent meditation session, I heard this ability described as a superpower. I loved that analogy because when I can do it, it feels magical. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that I am attempting to be aloof to every moment. Emotions are good. They are signals that tell you more about your relationship with the world. I am now more often able to recognize that it’s a signal and can step back and try to understand what it’s really trying to tell me.

Losing weight

A surprising side-effect of being at home was that I lost a lot of weight fairly quickly! There are probably three things that drove this. First, I no longer had the stressor of making a major career decision 👔. Second, I no longer had all the amazing free Google food, snacks, and afternoon cappuccinos ☕. Third, I took many long quiet walks 🚶🏾.

Long quiet walks

In the early months of the lockdown, the cool spring mornings aligned with my daughter's first nap. I took long walks with her peacefully napping in the stroller. I listened to audiobooks and podcasts, I talked with friends and family on the phone, and most importantly I enjoyed the serenely quiet mornings when the world had stopped.

This doesn’t happen as often anymore, but I welcome it when it does.

Coding again

After years of management and leadership roles, I took on a part-time contract to code. At first, I worried I’d be super rusty. But everything started coming back quickly and I felt more effective than I ever had before. I think it’s because when I was managing teams, I always ensured I understood the fundamentals of the engineering decisions being made. This allowed me to learn from all the engineers on my team in a highly distilled way. This may be a counter-intuitive result of going into management, but for me at least, this seems to hold.

Will I keep doing this? I am not sure. For now, it's a good way to spend my time while I can't travel. At the very least it's rebuilding my empathy for the day to day work of software engineering again.

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Along with everything else, 2020 also brought reflection, understanding, and presence of mind. 2021 will have its own set of surprises; it's impossible to plan out. I hope to carry forward the good things into the new year. Like the rest of this world, I plan to take it as it comes.