Yearly Reflections: 2022

Dec. 30, 2022

📍 writing in the living room of my family’s house in Starý Plzenec, Czech Republic

I have a little confession to make: I have always wanted to write an article like this. To have a look back over the last twelve months of one’s life, reminiscing, pondering, looking forward to (hopefully better) tomorrows, and then share it in public. I did compile such reflective write-ups into my own private diary in the past - but I believe writing and sharing this publicly brings some advantages:

Okay, without further ado, let’s dive into this.

Summary of 2022

After the pandemic-induced mixture of chaos and slowdown in 2020 and 2021, 2022 finally brought the much-needed post-pandemic relief, with things mostly returning back to how they used to be. Overall, it was a very good year - perhaps even my favourite one so far.

Travelling

Arguably the most exciting side of things was on the travelling front. After all the uncertainty caused by the global outbreak, things finally relaxed (from my perspective) around April of 2022. With the relaxation, things felt a swing of a pendulum from one extreme to the other: from near zero travel to LOTS of travelling all happening at once.

In February, I was given a chance to go for a month to Princeton University in New Jersey, and join the research lab and team of Prof Paul Prucnal for four weeks. The experience of working in a world-leading photonics research lab was exhilarating. Together with seeing Bonobo perform live in Brooklyn on the Fragments Tour, these made for two of my personal highlights of the year. Trip soundtrack: C. Tangana: Tiny Desk NPR Session

Alexander Hall in Princeton University campus

In May, I attended Optica’s CLEO22 conference in San José, California as a speaker. This marked my first return to the Bay Area since 2007 and a first proper visit to San Francisco. Scrambling up to the top of Eureka Peak (Twin Peaks) was definitely the highlight of my visit to The Golden City. Trip soundtrack: Cannons - Fever Dream.

On my way back from California, I stopped over in Fort Collins, Colorado to visit Kačka, one of my longest and dearest friends. Together with he husband Kuba, they have moved to their brand-new house on the day of my arrival, and I was happy to contribute some manual labour to the process as well. 😏 Going to the Rockies for a short hike to the Emerald Lake on a crisp sunny day was such a memorable experience. Trip soundtrack: Two Another - Coming Alive.

During the summer period, a slew of European trips for both work and holidays took place, including Spain & Mallorca, the Greek island of Rhodos, Portugal as well as visit back home in Czechia and a trip to High Tatras mountains in Slovakia. Trip soundtracks: Cosmo’s Midnight - We Could Last Forever (Skeleten Rework) | Tensnake, Cara Melín - Antibodies | DREAMERS - Palm Reader.

November in particular marked the most intense (in a good way) travel month.

Wellbeing

Inspired by my very good friend Martin and some of my personal research, I decided to try and lower my body fat amount, aiming towards somewhere around the mark of 17%. To achieve this, I employed the principle of calorie counting (CICO, using the FatSecret iOS app) with only two rules: aim to stay below a given calorie threshold every day, and aim to maximize the intake of proteins whenever possible. To facilitate fat burning without losing too much muscle, I kept lifting (using free Hevy iOS app to track the workouts) and closing the activity ring daily in the Apple Fitness app. I did fairly low amount of cardio, either in the form of jogging, squash or hillwalking on weekends. To keep track of things, I use Xiaomi’s Body Composition Scale 2 every morning. Having cold, hard data at hand that show the trends in body measures is what made the difference for me (although I understand that it can be very easy to get obsessive with numbers, so be careful there).

Results? In six months, going steadily from 26% to 23% BF, while managing to keep the muscle and even keep getting gradually stronger. I’m very happy with the progress and I am looking forward to resuming and optimizing the procedure in the upcoming year. Plenty of travelling last year made this actually more difficult, so let’s see how the next year unfolds.

Concerts

2022 was also a year when live music finally made its way back to our lives. My number one experience was seeing Bonobo (live act) in Brooklyn in late February. I have wanted to see them play for such a long time - and finally, I got a chance during my stay at Princeton. To make matters more unusual, I actually missed the sale and only got a ticket as I put my name on the waiting-list for re-sellers in the DICE app. What in the end made the experience truly unique was when Grey Reverend, the singer from my favourite Bonobo song First Fires, suddenly appeared on stage. Apparently, he is living in Brooklyn, and joined for this stop (and this stop only) of their tour. Seeing Nicole Miglis from Hundred Waters join the band on vocals was also really nice, and made for a truly memorable experience.

Besides Bonobo, I also saw the audio-visual magician Max Cooper @ SWG3, disco-pop-electronic band JUNGLE @ Junction2 and Dead Poet Society + Badflower @ St Luke’s in Glasgow, and I very much enjoyed all of the performances.

Assorted media diet of 2022

Things that did not go as planned

One of the things where I feel like I could have handled better was in chairing the postgraduate student society at my uni. I picked the baton of chairing it in late 2020, amidst the covid madness. For more than year, we did manage to keep a good momentum going - but in late 2021, instead of succesfully passing the leadership to the next generation after a big welcome event, my focus got scattered, and since then, the whole chapter was on hiatus. I believe another thing at play here was also the fallout from the pandemic and how it changed the social behaviour of students.

Second, I have not managed to produce any new songs this year. I usually go between short, rather intense creative periods followed by longer stretches of not creating any new music at all. Nonetheless, I always aimed to have at least one new song per year - but this year, I did not even manage to do that. Recently, I have been feeling quite creative, and once I finish my thesis, I aim to produce a new EP. Until then, my latest song remains Venir a Verte.

A minor personal challenge was to finally complete hundred Munros (highest mountains) in Scottish Highlands. While progress on Munros was very fast during the pandemic (when international travel was limited), this year, we have managed much fewer than expected. Currently, I have 91 Munros in my bag.

Looking forward to 2023