The 10 Things 2021 Taught and Gave Me
A Year of Experimentation Led To (Mostly) Positive Results
A Year of Experimentation Led To (Mostly) Positive Results
I fess up: I follow astrology. I’m even doing a podcast series about each of the astrological seasons. I think astrology is amazing.
Good, now that I’ve just lost 80 percent of my audience, I can speak to those of you who aren’t the type to dismiss a man just because he has an interest in something too many in our culture dismiss out of hand.
Anyway, it wasn’t until the fall of 2019 that I began to seriously follow this ancient art/science. And, well, if you read my “The 8 Valuable Lessons 2020 Taught Me,” you’ll see that by following astrology, I learned some very valuable lessons which helped me navigate the stormy seas of 2020.
So entering 2021, an astrologer I follow said her theme for the year was: “Trial and Error.” Her advice was to use 2021 as a grand experiment. Don’t hold onto outcomes, don’t stick with things if they aren’t working and see where it all takes you.
Turns out that was pretty good advice! Did I always follow it? Of course not, silly! I am human, after all. Then again, maybe being human proves the point. For if there’s one thing I feel I’ve learned in my 48 trips around the sun, it’s that we humans are here to learn from our experiences, to discover ourselves through the mistakes we make. And that, my friends, is how I want to lead in to this year’s post, “10 Things 2021 Taught and Gave Me.”
Before I do, perhaps you noticed that I added two more items to what I learned compared to 2020. Was there any reason for this? No. I just like to be different, okay? And in that spirit, unlike last year, I’m not going to count down from the top. This time, I’m just gonna write them at random and let you decide what order you’d put them in.
10. Fun Is Serious Business
It’s important to remember to have fun when times are tough.
For whatever reason, when winter turns to spring (and summer to fall), I tend to go into a funk. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember and I just have to deal with it. Having the awareness that I usually go through these periods makes it easier only in the sense that I know it will pass. Still, it’s not easy.
One way I handle such periods is by indulging in media that brings me joy. And in late March, boy did I hit upon a doozy: a YouTube channel called Major League Wiffleball.
Let me explain. When I was growing up in suburban western Washington, I was a baseball player and one of my favorite forms of the game was with this crazy plastic ball called a Wiffle ball.
I was so into it that, in our backyard, my father converted our old swing set into a backstop and built a net that extended over our fence to make hitting home runs more challenging.
Anyway, I spent many hours playing wiffleball and, to tell the truth, I was better at it than real baseball. I was a stellar left-handed pitcher and hitter. Sometimes I even thought if there had been a pro wiffleball league, I would have pursued it.
Flash forward to spring 2021. My daughter had been playing on her elementary school baseball team since first grade (here in Japan, boys and girls play on the same team and she more than holds her own!). Anyway, last year, she had to swing her bat 500 times every day after practice. Yes, they are very serious — maybe too serious in my opinion — about the sport here!
Well, it was kind of a boring exercise so one day, she remembered we had bought a bunch of Wiffle balls on a visit to the U.S., so we took them over to a vacant field where I could throw her pitches. Yes, it took a long-ass time to get to 500 swings, and, as is often the case for a guy with ADHD, my mind started drifting and I suddenly wondered: “Are there any pro wiffleball leagues on YouTube?” Thus, I took out my phone and did a YouTube search for “Major League Wiffleball” and this is what I found.
MLW Wiffle Ball
Welcome to the home of the most-watched Wiffle Ball league in the world! MLW consists of 8 different teams as well as a…www.youtube.com
According to their website, MLW is a league that was started in 2009 in Brighton, Michigan by three brothers and two neighborhood friends, forming a 5-person, 2-team league. “We would play wiffleball every chance we could in the summer and it’s safe to say we were hooked from the start,” writes league commissioner Kyle Schwartz (and one of the stars on the field, too).
Over the years, the boys have grown up and they’ve expanded the league to eight teams, each year adding better and better talent, and, as of this writing, their YouTube channel has just shy of 300,000 subscribers and 43 million views! In addition, they host and travel to tournaments around the country and they have an extensive merchandise shop which I’m promising myself I’m going to order from soon!
Now, the lesson finding this channel was simple: Fun is freakin’ important. And when you combine it with hard work and passion, you get a wonderful result.
You see, these guys have put a ton of work into their league. Watching one of their videos of their games is truly like watching sports on a major TV station like ESPN. But the thing is, unlike professional and big-time college sports, all of the players in MLW are playing for the love of the game. Now, perhaps the players get to share in some of the spoils of the business, but I’m reasonably confident they aren’t playing for the kind of obscene money that pro athletes are making.
In addition, watching them reminds me of that wonderful camaraderie young men can have when participating in something they all enjoy. There’s a fair amount of good-natured ribbing of each other (“dissing” as we used to say in the 1980s), but you can see that they are good sports who enjoy playing the game and having fun together.
And in these times, where things can often feel really heavy either on a personal level or in the collective, having people commit to a passion project and having so much fun at it, well, that’s a real gift. Thanks guys, congrats Diamondbacks and see you in 2022! Go Cobras!
9. Looking Backward Can Help Us Move Forward
This was a lesson I received during the weeks leading up to and after the 20th anniversary of 9–11. I’m just about to enter the final year of my 40s. There’s a fair amount of territory I’ve already explored in life. Yet I tend to be a person who is either in the present moment or who is thinking about the future. I suppose I always did relate to this song by Guns N Roses, where Axl Rose sings “Yesterday’s got nothin’ for me…”
But sometimes when we feel confused about the direction we should go in, looking back at what worked in the past, at the things we’ve experienced and what lit us up, can be a very helpful tool.
I was 28 on 9/11/2001. It was a very transformative time in my life. I’ve written extensively about it, but in short, I learned that when life can be cut short at any moment, it’s too short to put up with bullshit. From anybody. Integrity matters and that means not suffering fools who don’t have it.
As soon as George W. Bush started to speak on the eve of 9/11, I felt something was off. As a result, I became one of a very small number of people who felt that the attack on Afghanistan, ostensibly to get Osama bin Laden, was about something more, and that it may end up costing America dearly.
So when, in late August, the U.S. boggled its exit from Afghanistan to the point where people were making Vietnam comparisons, all of this started to come back to me: I had been correct back then, yet most people were calling me crazy.
How does this tie into 2021?
Governments around the world, with a big assist from corporate media, aren’t being honest in their handling of COVID-19, they are using this tragedy to pass horrible policies to increase their control and, by doing so, they are turning humans against each other.
And you know what? I’ve known this since the start of the pandemic because I’ve understood the nature of Power since the late 1990s. However, until the end of August, I’d been too quiet about this.
I have much, much more to say on this topic. I recently wrote the blog post below which will be, I hope, the start of several posts on current events in 2020 where I elaborate more fully on what I’ve written here. I’ll just finish this segment with this: Power, which the excellent dissident writer CJ Hopkins calls GlobalCap, has turned its need for an enemy, as Orwell warned us, against its citizens. And it has allied itself with Big Tech and billionaires with little understanding of human psychology but way too much power like Bill Gates. I’m not going to remain silent about this anymore. Expect more content from me moving forward as I rely on what I have known for a long time now.
The Two Questions I’d Ask Bill Gates
Gates’ trust in government and oversized belief in himself are a problem for us allmedium.com
8. I Need to Blog More Regularly
I’ve been working on the previous section and suddenly realized it was getting super-duper long. Long enough for a separate post. And when I look at how few articles I’ve written this year and think about all the things I have to say, yes, in 2021 I didn’t blog enough. That’s going to change in 2022.
Back in 2018, I made a New Year’s resolution — I’d publish a blog post every week on my Sunday night. And so I did. Most of those are reasonably long essays, around 3,000 words on average. I put a lot of time into those. Yet I was working a full-time job and also doing various side jobs with private students and being involved in my children’s baseball activities.
While 2022 will be slightly busier in my teaching schedule than 2021, it won’t be near as busy as I was in 2018. Thus, I’m saying this right now: I’m committing to my writing in 2022. Some of that will show up as blog posts.
Anyway, this is an example of what I wrote about in the intro, learning from our mistakes. So thank you 2021 and thank you lazy Bryan!
7. Schedules Are A Good Thing, But Don’t Be a Slave to Them
In spring 2020, I stopped working full-time so I could become a freelancer. Overall, this has been a positive thing as I was growing seriously burnt out always being on the clock and working so many hours. However, the biggest challenge is I now have to be more rigid with myself about making a schedule so I don’t end up whittling away my days.
April and May in 2020 first taught me that. I’d wake up when I wanted to, chat on social media and catch up with the crazy news of those early Coronavirus days and before I knew it, it would be early afternoon!
Still, having been on a full-time schedule since childhood, I found I needed 2020 to recuperate. I think our culture keeps us busy in an almost nefarious fashion. At the very least, it’s not good for our mental health, not if we want to be holistic human beings.
However, at the start of 2021, I realized I could benefit from having more structure to my days. So I bought a handy whiteboard that sticks on my bedroom door and began to use it to write down daily and weekly schedules.
Still, if I’m honest, this scheduling thing has been hit or miss in 2021. I feel I’ve gotten reasonably good at making daily schedules and following them. It’s the weekly, monthly and yearly goals that I want to improve on in 2022.
On the other hand, I feel 2021 has taught me to be better at discerning what my body’s energy is like and working my schedule around it. I now know that I tend to do my best creative work in the mornings and that after lunch I go into a lull. This means, I regularly schedule an afternoon nap. If I were to run for president, I’d have naps in my platform! After the nap, I usually have a few hours of solid work in me, though this work is better for administrative tasks, editing writing, correcting papers, etc.
I’m looking forward to seeing how I can improve my life in 2022 by making more of a commitment to creating and — key here — following long-term goals. But for now, I’m grateful 2021 showed me some tricks in controlling my scatterbrained tendencies.
6. Getting In Touch With My Body’s Rhythms Helps My Productivity
Our modern culture lives way too much on the clock. It then assumes our individual bodies are uniform and creates policies that supposedly work for everyone. They aren’t and they don’t. For example, studies show most teenagers are naturally slow risers who like to stay up late. However, most schools treat teens the same way they treat younger children and thus, ask any teacher, most first-period classes for high school-aged students are kind of a waste of time!
Now, because I began working freelance and often from home, I began to better listen to my body, asking it when it wanted to sleep or eat. In fact, it’s 3:30 PM now and I can feel myself getting drowsy, feel the words moving like molasses from my awareness and onto the screen so it’s time for my nap! This essay will wait and it will be the better for it.
(About one hour later: So much better! I find these afternoon naps almost seem to be doubly as efficient as sleep at night. Back to work!)
5. Listening to My Body Improves My Health In Every Way
This is obviously connected to #6, but I want to talk about a few practices I’ve continued but deepened from years past and one new practice from 2021.
The practice I’ve continued is the Wim Hof Method, which I began in May 2019. Now, I won’t say it’s all a result of the WHM, but since I began it, I’ve not been sick. Once. Not so much as a cold. And I’m a person who had annual fall colds and has had bronchitis several times and pneumonia twice.
In a nutshell, the Wim Hof Method involves breathing exercises, cold exposure, meditation and daily commitment. I’ve spoken about it on my podcast, and in 2022, I will publish an essay that will better describe how I use it.
Usually, I do the activities in my house and they take about 30 minutes: 10–15 for the three rounds of deep breathing, 5–10 for the meditation and 5–10 for the cold shower (and yes, I do the cold showers in the dead of winter and find they are even more effective! I always feel my confidence is given a jolt and they work better than coffee. It’s just a matter of doing it, not thinking about it).
However, in 2021, I began to do the breathing and meditation exercises outside, usually at a park bench near my house, but sometimes on a sandy river shore just a short bike ride away. I find that doing it in the fresh air of the outdoors enhances the mental health effects, giving me both more energy for the day and more of a sense of being grounded.
And speaking of being grounded, that leads to the new body activity I began. It’s called — wait for it — grounding! It’s nothing more than putting one’s bare feet directly on the Earth. I had a bum knee that got pretty bad in fall 2020 and what attracted me to this practice was I heard grounding can, by connecting the body’s energy system directly into the Earth, alleviate some of the aches and pains caused by inflammation.
And you know what: it worked! The improvement was rapid, remarkable really. Nowadays, for the most part, I don’t feel any pain at all.
In addition, I just like the sensual experience of putting my feet on the ground, noticing how it is different depending on the time of year. It’s certainly colder in the winter! This also led me to discover the pleasure of dancing barefoot in soft leaves, re-connecting me to some of my West Coast hippie roots.
4. The Inter-Connected Nature of the Internet Continues to Be a Life-Enhancing Thing
To be honest, I knew this already. I’ve known this since the late 1990s when I first discovered that, by using the connectivity of the Internet to love my fellow humans, I could form some awesome friendships. And it sure feels a lot better than using it to hate.
Now, in the first few months of 2021, I probably felt more despondent than I’ve ever felt about where humanity is and where it may be going. Certainly, the way Power is working with the rapid advancements of technology to create a technocratic, authoritarian world is not the vision I and many others had, in the 1990s when we thought about the potential of the Internet.
Having said that, in 2021 I continue to see how much my life benefits from being able to access voices all over the world, be they on podcasts, video channels like YouTube or over social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and, increasingly for me, Telegram and The Mighty Networks.
Some of these are people I’ve never met and likely never will, like Harvard scientist/lecturer/podcast host Lex Fridman, whose podcast I found in February. I disagree with Lex about a fair number of things, but I love his curiosity, his intelligence, his playfulness and, very importantly, his humility. This clip below is a great example of who Lex is and why, even though I sometimes disagree with him, he is a kindred spirit.
In addition to finding people like Lex and those joyful, hard-working boys playing whiffle ball in Michigan, I’ve also made some incredible connections with media producers who I’ve gotten to know. One such person is Monica Harris, who I discovered in August when she wrote this amazing article, “Why So Many Americans are Resisting a Vaccine Mandate.”
Monica writes with passion, integrity, clarity and heart. For that reason alone she’s worth following. However, I love how her life story feels like a much-needed re-defining of the American Dream. She grew up in a black working-class neighborhood, busted her butt in school and graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law school, became a business affairs executive in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles and then, one day about a decade ago, she had an epiphany that this “successful” life wasn’t working. So she and her partner moved to rural Montana, to unplug and pursue a more sustainable lifestyle. On top of that, she’s Black and a lesbian and now lives in one of the more red states in America. All in all, I find her story one of those quintessential American tales, someone who is defying the labels and expectations and is constantly re-inventing herself. It moves me as I write those words, and gives me the hope — and, yes, pride — I have in my native country which I left in 2004.
And now, she’s, like me, a person who increasingly feels like she’s lost her tribe, not because her values have changed but because theirs have. Like me, she still believes deeply in the values of Martin Luther King Jr., judging a person not by their physical appearances but by what’s in their hearts and minds, she is a champion of the poor and the underdog and distrusts Power and, well, so much more.
I implore you to read her work to get to know her; hers is a voice that deserves much more amplification, the kind of voice that can return America to the path of its ideals, which are still highly valued by humans all over the world. In my 17 years living in Japan, I’ve had many Japanese people speak passionately about how much they look up to American ideals. I am increasingly praying that Americans don’t give them up so easily; they are worth fighting for!
Last, I also met many wonderful friends via the Internet. Mostly, this was through becoming a member of the Rebel Wisdom community and attending many of their events, especially through the summer. I’ve also become an active member of a community on The Mighty Networks that has branched off from Rebel Wisdom and, at the end of 2021, I feel I have a much bigger family of interesting, diverse friends than I did one year ago.
3. Music Continues To Be A Favorite Companion
I realize now that this post is already long. Really freakin’ long. And if I were to start to write about how much I love music, it’s likely I won’t finish until New Year’s Eve 2022.
So I’ll keep this one short: Phish, you four lovable bastards you, you put on what I consider to be one of your greatest years ever and I continue to be amazed by your creativity and productivity even though you are all entering serious grey hair territory. I can’t wait until I’m able to travel across the pond and see you again.
There are too many other great bands and artists who I loved and discovered so I’ll just name a few: Phoebe Bridgers, in particular, this hauntingly beautiful song which I put on repeat for a week there in late August; the solo work of Robert Palmer; a continued love affair with 1990s rock, including this breezy B-side from The Smashing Pumpkins; a 2010s alt-rock rave-up from Big Thief; a wonderful, haunting and so-true new cut from Kacey Musgraves; and folks, I’m getting carried away just like I said I would!
Thank you, musicians. Thank you so much.
2. I Still Love Humanity, Despite Ourselves
I’m gonna leave that one with just the header. Love you guys … now shape up! Ha ha.
1. Earth is a Free Will University
Okay, I know I said these weren’t in any order. I lied.
This one has to be my number one.
I never knew how much I valued freedom until 2021. I have those who have been forcing lockdowns and medical experiments onto people around the world to thank for this realization (It’s a very productive personal growth exercise to thank one’s opposition for the lessons they teach us.)
I’m not going to go into this one too deeply; maybe it’ll be a 2022 essay, maybe not. Partly it’s because this essay has been long, but more it’s because this is a deeply held spiritual belief of mine and, well, another of my spiritual beliefs is that spirituality is a very personal matter.
As my band Phish sings in one of my favorite songs of theirs, “I will choose my own religion, worship my own Spirit, but if you ever preach to me, I wouldn’t want to hear it.”
In addition, I am reasonably certain there are many other intelligent life forms besides humans. Some of them live on various planets all over this massively huge universe, some even in other dimensions that we don’t yet understand, but from my various readings about them as well as my intuition, I don’t believe that free will is all that common in these other places. But Earth? Yes, the whole point of Earth is it’s a place where free will exists, where we humans are basically in a “school” and we are here to learn some very challenging lessons, lessons that can only be learned by having free will.
Thus, any person or any social institution that attempts to take away free will is, well, at odds with the whole point of this planet and the humans who live on it. Now, I wrote that last sentence with much intention, because a growing intuition of mine, which I will elaborate on in an upcoming essay, is that humanity may very well evolve so that some of our species move off-planet and, well, I’m not sure free will is going to be a part of the deal of that trip. Anyway, that’s a juicy thing to say, and let me just leave it there, a teaser of an upcoming essay which I’m very excited about!
Conclusion
And that’s it, folks, the end of the essay. I’d like to think 2022 will be a year when I will be blogging more. It’s also a year when I plan to publish some of my writing — fiction and non-fiction — in book form. But I’m getting ahead of myself, this is a post about 2021, not 2022! For now, I’d like to thank those of you who have read this far and invite you to share some of the things 2021 taught or gave you in the comments below.
Okay, see you next year (which is now less than six hours away as I type this!)
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