Month-in-Review Highlights: March 2021

Sheep and lambs scattered across a farm outside of Lausanne, Switzerland, as seen on a hike through the area. March 3, 2021.

I postmortem each month shortly after it ends, reflecting on what happened in general and, more specifically, in the context of my goals. Though I don’t share all my insights here, I have made it a practice to share at least one key highlight or insight. (To read previous months’ reviews, click here.)

I made one of my goals for 2021 to try a few new sports and athletic activities, somewhat in keeping with the spirit of bringing the fun back into exercise (as I recounted in my February goals progress report).

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis hasn’t made trying new sports as possible as I’d expected back in November, when I wrote down my goals for the year ahead. Many sports require at least a beginner-level lesson or a class of some kind or access to equipment or locations where, typically, people would need to gather.

However, though I can’t call it an entirely new sport to me, I made a bit more of an effort on the hiking front in March. Let’s call it more of a college-try attempt than I’ve made in the past. (And yes, this has required fighting against the reluctance engendered by my previous hiking attempts and their attendant epiphanies that I don’t like hiking—as I recounted in this post about my trip to the Grand Canyon).

Desperation is the mother of invention, as they say, and this crisis has driven me to trying again with sports I long ago decided I didn’t like.

We’ll see how it goes.

On a different front, I’ve struggled as well in the first quarter of this year with making progress on one of my creative goals in particular.

Before the year began, I’d set myself the challenge to learn more about how to create video, from the shooting to the editing, in the hopes of broadening my creative skill-set for this site, for FrogDog, and for whatever other purposes I could find for video in the future.

Heck, just the challenge of learning something new that can broaden my creative horizons energizes me.

However.

I haven’t had much success in finding subjects of interest for video.

And if I can’t think of a topic or a subject, I can’t shoot any footage. (The footage I shoot simply because I see something interesting seems random and purposeless later.) Without any raw material, I can’t really learn how to edit and shape an end product.

It’d be fun to review the videos in my Vimeo account in chronological order and see progress. However, as of right now, a full quarter into the year, I’ve got nothing but video clips I created in years past.

So I’ll take suggestions for video subjects, if you have them.

Ideas?