2022 in review
TL;DR: Hopes and goals in review and prep
I am a resolutions person. I divide them into two categories: Hopes and Goals.
Hope are resolutions that are hard to quantify in actions. For instance, in 2022, I wanted to “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.”
I cribbed that from someone, but it spoke to me. At a time when so much seems gloomy and failed, I wanted to find a way to keep joy at the center. I wanted joy—and specifically seeking joy—to be a constant quest.
How did I do this? Well, that would be a Goal, the specific things I tried to do that created joy. One of them was tutoring a six-year-old in reading. This once-a-week commitment was sometimes hard to honor. I admit that on a few occasions I feared that I wouldn’t be able to fill the hour I spent with A., a rambunctious, curious, mischief-prone little creature.
But finding a way to do that not only brought me a sense of joy. It’s made me a better teacher to the 18-and-20-somethings I make a living teaching in a university classroom. I realized that A. learned better when he was touching things and active with his whole body. I searched for pop-up books (there aren’t many in the library) then moved to games like Zingo (a word-recognition Bingo) and a game with magnetic letters on circles.
I long ago lost the instructions and even name of the magnetic game. It doesn’t matter. A. doesn’t follow instructions well anyway. My goal is to help A. put letters together in words and then words into sentences that are his. And we are fully able to do that as we make up our own rules.
Some nights, I leave the library where we meet frustrated and other nights I feel like I’m walking on air.
I feel joy. We’re making progress even as we’re regularly shushed by librarians.
That said, I need to be more aggressive in finding ways to experience joy. One “goal”-you’re getting the hang of this now, right?—is to spend more time on relationships I value. That means walks and lunch and outings with friends and family as well as more time writing what I love.
I try the practicing gratitude exercise, but I’m not a fan. I tend to put down the same things week by week. I’d love to hear suggestions for how to make that more fulfilling.
Have you created a gratitude journal? Does it work for you—and how? Leave a comment!
Another achievement was to write more within the world of The Bond Trilogy, which I completed this year with the publication of The Mother’s Wheel (the book won the 2022 Indie Author award for young adult fiction by a North Carolina Writer).
The Books, Bones & Buffy blog also named The Mother’s Wheel one of the best science fiction books of 2022 (thank you!).
After writing and rewriting and re-rewriting, I finished a story in The Bond universe called “Making 12.” The story is free for newsletter subscribers as an e-book and pdf!
Just to whet your appetite, here’s the first bit:
The wax globe would have looked enormous in anyone’s hands but hers.
Kesh adjusted her metal fingers to better mimic the shape of a cradle. Another Sower had already poked a hole in the globe’s creamy surface to siphon out the nektar once stored there. Kesh was after the residue still coating the globe’s inner wall.
This was the only way she could collect enough nektar for her secret project. High overhead, frost rimmed the glass panes of the SowerLab. The panes looked like dozens of eyes staring down and blinking a faint blue from the full moon.
Let me know if you have trouble downloading and I will send a copy!
One of my 2022 goals was to revamp my newsletter (as many are doing in the age of Musk and Zuckerberg). In 2022, I posted on some of the human rights heroes profiled in my book, Righting Wrongs: 20 human rights heroes around the world:
Yes, that’s Mehta on the book’s cover!
One thing I’m proud of is how much I’ve read this year. I ended up blowing by my Goodreads goal of 120 (you can find me here). Mostly science fiction and fantasy, some non-fiction, and any Louise Penny mystery I can get my hands on (I blew through her “Three Pines” series on Amazon Prime, with the wonderful Alfred Molina as Inspector Armand Gamache)
Here are some of my favorite reads if you're looking for inspiration.
I was lucky to travel to Jerusalem and the West Bank as part of an academic delegation in 2022. One of the friends I met there (his family runs the only Arabic bookstore in Jerusalem, the Educational Bookstore) recommended Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: A biography.
In my Goodreads review, I wrote, “This is a lot to put under a single cover, but Montefiore's writing and approach kept me engaged. There's so much here, which I was digesting during a trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank. Violence and dissent are no strangers to the region. The current parlous state of Jerusalem is very much in sync with the past. Yet I kept asking myself why it has to be this way. Have we learned nothing about the poisons of nationalism on either or all sides?”
In 2022, I completed one of the best scifi series ever, The Expanse, with the ninth and final book, Leviathan Falls by the writing duo known as James S. A. Corey. The series gave me a tremendous gift of two characters I’ll never forget, the mechanic and killer Amos Burton and the intergalactic diplomat (and potty-mouth) Chrisjen Avasarala (stream the excellent Amazon prime series here).
Finally, like President Barack Obama, I really enjoyed Ed Yong’s An Immense World. In my review, I noted, “This book is an eye-opener about how senses determine the world you experience -- and how animals, with their different and often unique senses, experience their lives in ways that humans simply can't understand.”
For someone who writes science fiction and often creates new creatures, it was illuminating to learn that our Earth has living, thriving creatures that are as strange and wonderful as anything authors have ever described on a page.
More of my recommended books are available via my Bookshop.
A last joy I’ll mention is making sure I’m spending more time with family and friends. I hope you have that particular pleasure in your life. For now, I’ll leave this newsletter—the last of 2022—with one of my favorite selfies of the year, my son and me at the Christmas Day screening of “Avatar: The Way of Water” (in 3D).
During the three-hour film, I had plenty of time for two quick naps. There was amazing CGI and (at least) five poorly-told stories: 1. coming of age being different 2. Noble Indigenous fighting white villains 3. humans being crap to beautiful, innocent animals 4. At all costs, defending the 1950s American family with Dad at the helm and Mom cooking 5. Violence is the only thing that works against violence). In addition of loving spending time with my son, I was glad so many great actors (Cliff Curtis, Zoe Saldana, Kate Winslet) secured their retirement!
