If I had to describe my relationship status with goals, I’d have to go with “it’s complicated.” On the one hand, it’s clear enough to me that goals can provide a sense of direction and purpose. Here’s a thing I want to achieve, so I’m going to set out to achieve it. On the other hand, goals can quickly become the bane of my existence too, because they can saddle me with so much pressure and guilt, feeling like I’m not living up to my own expectations. And that’s basically where I’m at for my 2022 goals right now.

Now that we’ve reached the halfway point of the year (how did that happen?!?!), I thought I’d be a good time to reflect on my goals for 2022 and how I’m doing with them so far. If you set any goals or resolutions for yourself for this year, I encourage you to do the same. In corporate speak in an agile framework, we might call this a “retrospective.” Today’s reflection, of course, will be nowhere near as formal. Though there may be an informal performance review…

In any case, I had three main goals for 2022. Here’s how they’re going.

Speak Cantonese More With My Children

Like many other children of immigrants, I was almost ashamed of my Chinese heritage as a child. Instead, I wanted so desperately to be Canadian. It is only as I have gotten older that I’ve come to appreciate and value my cultural background more. This has become even more important to me in recent years as I see my specific cultural background under threat.

The nature and context of Chinese Vancouver in particular, and of Chinese culture more broadly, has changed over the years. Mandarin has clearly become the lingua franca in China (and more and more among the Chinese diaspora), which also means that fewer and fewer people are speaking Cantonese, the language more common in Guangdong and Hong Kong, as well as various Chinatowns around the globe. It doesn’t help that my command of the language is weak at best.

I had hoped to preserve Cantonese as part of our cultural heritage and identity with my children. Well, it hasn’t gone as well as I had hoped, to say the least. We still speak English 99 percent of the time. So, I hope to approach this second half of 2022 (and beyond) with renewed vigor. At some point, I’d also like to revitalize our use of Taishanese (Hoisan-wa), the mother tongue of the paternal side of my family.

Take Three Million Steps in 2022

Looking at my Fitbit stats, it looks like I’ve taken a total of 1,447,563 steps in the first half of this year. The easy math tells you that I should be at 1.5 million steps by the end of June if I want to hit a cool 3 million by December 31. So, that is to say that I’m close, but not completely on track. If I continue at my current pace, I’ll be a smidge over 100,000 steps shy of my goal by the end of the year.

This really is one of those situations where small, steady change is what’s going to make the biggest difference. It’s not about having a day here or there where I take way more steps than I normally do. It’s about making it more of a habit to hit my daily step goal every day. For context, I reached my daily step goal (of 9,000 steps) on 19 out 30 days in June.

I seem to be doing better in Q2 compared to Q1, taking nearly 50,000 more steps in April through June than I did in January through March. It’s quite possible that weather is playing a role, which would also mean that I need to be especially vigilant in Q3 to compensate for what may be a slower Q4. (There’s that corporate speak coming through. Sorry about that.)

Learn to Let It Go, Let It Go

As I said in my original post back in January, this goal is the most intangible and the hardest to measure. It’s purely qualitative and I can really only assess it on a “gut feeling” kind of level. Intellectually, I think I’m coming to understand and appreciate “letting go” as a concept better. It takes work, but I can take a step back to better contextualize the situation. I may be blogging less, for example, but I’m more active on other platforms and have other responsibilities.

Actually internalizing my own justifications, advice and explanations, of course, is far easier said than done. As someone who has always struggled with this idea of living up to expectations and seeking external validation for any semblance of self-worth, I don’t have an easy time with “letting go.” It’s okay to take a break and cut myself some slack. I know that, but I don’t yet feel it. Work in progress, for sure.

On 2022 Goals, Priorities and Perceived Progress

Taken as a whole, assessing my progress on these three main goals for 2022, I come away feeling remarkably underwhelmed. It’s not that I’m crashing and burning, necessarily, but I’m hardly knocking anything out of the park either. The not-so-subtle irony is that by trying to embrace the third goal more, I may have let the first two goals slip. And then there are the other things I’ve got going on.

For instance, I’ve read 26 books so far this year. Even though my Goodreads reading challenge target of 36 books is not one of my main goals for 2022, it’s almost become a priority of convenience. By comparison, I’ve “only” watched 17 movies this year so far. And I don’t follow nearly as many TV shows as I once did. Since I can’t watch my “grown-up stories” around the kids, I read more during my downtime. Which I suppose isn’t the worst thing in the world.

Perhaps it’s worthwhile to take a further step back. Rather than look at things at a more microscopic level, it’s more fruitful to compare where I am today compared to, say, 5 or 10 years ago. In that context, I think I’m okay. And I encourage you to do the same when thinking about how your 2022 goals are going so far. Where do you stand compared to where you were in 2017 or 2012? What steps can you take to keep moving forward?