At the beginning of 2020, I posted a piece about the growing global environmental crisis, and I ended with this brief list of New Year’s resolutions.
1. Consume less, and produce more
2. Learn to garden and grow plants, and plant some trees
3. Take public transport when possible
4. Ride my bike more often
Ironically, the onset of the pandemic and our decision to take shelter in my parents’ home in Massachusetts, which extended from one month to six months, helped me to meet at least some of these goals. As I have already blogged extensively over the past year, I did take a deep dive into nature. I spent a great deal of time in forests and wildlife refuges and learned a lot more about trees and plants. While I didn’t plant any trees, I certainly came to appreciate and understand them far better.
The pandemic also forced us to consume less and produce more. For example, while sojourning in the USA, we cooked most of our meals. On the other hand, the need for things while pandemicking in Acton Mass. did lead me to buy quite a few articles of clothing, books, and other items for myself and my daughters. In terms of public transport, that became a moot matter as we solaced in the United States. Perforce of the situation, I did do a lot less driving and really no commuting over those six months. And, best of all, I rekindled my old love for cycling, and I spent more time on a bicycle this year than I have at least since my grad school days.
As we enter into the year 2021, I’m shifting my resolutions from being more nature- and environment-conscious to focusing on developing some skills and furthering my various projects. This past year was one of dispersion. The circumstances of the year made it difficult to focus and concentrate on my projects. To be fair, I did make some progress and worked on a film and a few publications. But overall my mental energies and initiatives were fairly diffused over the pandemic year.
For example, as my previous post indicates, my reading list for 2020 was very broad, and I cast my net widely as I sought to both escape my mundane world and to understand some important things about it. At the same time, living in my hometown under the pandemic conditions led me to take full advantage of the opportunity to explore my home state of Massachusetts in a deep way I had never really done before.
I’m glad I was able to do this, but now that I am back in Shanghai and back at Duke Kunshan University, I’m looking forward to returning to projects that I put aside for the pandemic year, or at least put on the back burner.
Now that I am teaching full-time, I’m looking at my portfolio of activities, skills, and projects in a new light. When I was a full-time administrator over the past eight years, it was catch-as-catch-can when it came to working on non-administrative projects, academic or otherwise. I’m hoping that the additional flexibility of having a full teaching schedule, as demanding as it may be at times, will help me to concentrate more on advancing my various research, writing and film projects.
This calls for a great deal of focus, discipline, and concentration. These haven’t always been my strong suits. I tend to get excited about too many things at once, and I tend to get involved in too many projects at once. I admire my colleagues, who are able to focus all of their attention and energy on one research project, seeing it through to completion before they accept another big task. I’ve always been a multi-tasker, and while it has enabled me to get involved in a wide range of projects over the years, it’s been harder to bring any one of them to completion. This year I resolve to be more focused, disciplined, and persistent when it comes to working on my projects, and not to accept new ones until I complete old ones first.
Another thing I intend to work on more this year is my skills in languages and reading. For one thing, I’ve resolved to work on my Classical Chinese skills. Since teaching my course on Ancient China for Duke Kunshan University, it has become very clear how important it is for me to engage with the original texts as well as the translations. For this reason and a few others, I recently took the initiative to start a workshop on Classical Chinese for some of our faculty on campus, who are involved in classical studies. I’m hoping that this will become a regular event and that we can all learn from each other as we develop our reading and translation skills.
Another thing I’ve been meaning to do is to get into the habit of reading modern Chinese texts on a more regular basis. I do read Chinese for research purposes, but rarely for pleasure, and so I am hoping to start a daily practice of reading fiction in Chinese. My idea is to pick a novel and read it through in its entirety. This is not an easy task for me, since even though my Chinese reading ability is fairly good (for a foreigner at least), it is always slow going. But I’m hoping to get into a regular Chinese reading habit.
I also plan to engage more with my other Asian language:Japanese. Since reading the book of Japanese short stories in translation, which I blogged about in my previous post, I am determined to read some of these stories in their original language. My Japanese isn’t nearly as well developed as my Chinese, so it may prove too difficult to read entire novels. Instead, I’m thinking of starting with some short stories by authors I know and love and see how that goes.
Speaking of reading, I’ve always been a poor reader of music. This past year I did get into a daily habit of working on my two instruments, piano and guitar. I am somewhat satisfied with my progress in both instruments over the years, but one thing I’ve neglected is sight-reading. I was never a very proficient sight reader of piano music, and I’m hoping to work on that skill more this year and develop a daily habit of sight-reading some pieces for piano.
I also want to work on my guitar sight-reading skills. I’m pretty good at following tablature (i.e. where to place the fingers on the fretboard) but I still need to work on reading musical notation for guitar pieces. If I can get into a daily practice of working on my guitar sight-reading skills, I’ll be very happy.
That’s enough resolutions for now. I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew, and these are all realizable goals. I’m thinking of them not just as goals for this year, but for a lifetime of habits. All of these resolutions go back to being more focused and disciplined, and developing skills and furthering projects that I already have, so I’ll let that be the major theme of 2021 for my own self-improvement drive.
Reading more notes is one of my goals for 2021