Well somehow another year has come and gone, and 2022 certainly seemed to fly by! To say we started the year in fear of the rise of another COVID strain, and we’ve ended it with COVID barely being mentioned over the festive period feels like a real turnaround. 2022 hasn’t been without it’s challenges, but it’s also a year I’ll remember for a very long time due to some of the great experiences we’ve had. Some made all the sweeter for having to wait so long for them.
If I had to sum the last year up into one word it would be “connection”. So much of this year has been about reconnecting with family, friends, places and hobbies – all the connections that were lost or just felt a bit too distant over the last two years. Sadly this year has also been about loss of connection, with us saying goodbye to four family members over the course of 2022. This has made it a year of contradictions, with high highs and low lows, with some made all the more so due to their close proximity.
Whilst I might not have made too much headway with all the things on my list for the year, I’ve certainly managed to make a lot of memories along the way, as well as try some new things. It’s also been a year where I’ve seen a lot of big life decisions being made by other people (from having children or getting pets to changing career and travelling the world) which has often given me moments of reflection and considering my own life choices.
This year, more than others, I’ve been very conscious of my age and the implications of different life decisions as a result. If we were back in 2020, two years younger, the chance to live abroad for a year would have made a lot of sense whereas now it can feel like kicking the can further down the road when we could be thinking about buying a house. Of course, there’s still an awful lot of life yet and I think it’s been helpful to remind ourselves and other people of that – there’s still at least another 30 years of work still to go…
There’s a lot more I could say about this year, but I don’t particularly want to dwell on the hard times, and I’ve shared some of the highlights below. So here are some of my highlights of the year and some of the lessons learned along the way.
Highlights of 2022
- Finally celebrating our wedding with the most wonderful day I could have hoped for
- The trip of a lifetime to Canada
- Gaining a ‘niece dog’
- Going to the commonwealth games
- A long weekend in York, heading back down memory lane and filled with great food
- A spontaneous trip to Pembrokeshire
- Seeing lots of friends and spending quality time with them – particularly a couple of very happy weekends in Cambridge, and hosting various friends and family in Bristol
- Beginning new hobbies – joining a choir and starting ice skating lessons
- Being able to make plans and know with some certainty that they will happen
Lessons learned in 2022
- Some things are worth the wait (or made all the sweeter for it)
- Sometimes you have to trust your gut
- Moraine Lake is one of the most beautiful places in the world
- Having a social life can be exhausting
- It’s ok to take a sick day
- Great things can come from silly ideas
- Singing as part of a group is a truly wonderful thing
- Time should be treasured
- Put me in front of some live sport and I’ll yell with the best of them
- Coaching is a really valuable experience
- Sometimes you have to have difficult conversations. They can be scary. But the results are best if you’re honest.
- Life often plans itself
- If you say things can only get better to yourself for long enough they usually do, but getting through the period when you’re saying it is tough and can take far too long
- Sometimes the higher you go, the further you have to fall
- National Trust days out are a pleasure
- Wildlife, walking and food are what I need to be happy
- Brass bands are great, particularly when you’re not expecting them to be
- Corn dogs are surprisingly tasty
- Sometimes it takes someone else following your dream for you to realise it’s actually not what you want
- My friends are wonderful. I knew this already, but I’ve had it reconfirmed so many times. And it’s nice when other people tell you how great your friends are too.
What has been your highlight of 2022?
