By Ethan Maurice | January 12, 2021

With the turn of each year, I find great benefit and long-term orientation in reflecting on the one past and envisioning the one to come.

While a new year is an arbitrarily chosen point in Earth’s lap around the sun, it is a regular mark of transition. And as transitions tend to cause us to pause and reflect, a new year seems an ideal reminder to zoom out of the day to day and look at the big picture of our lives.

That said, I don’t believe in resolutions or overly focusing on specific future targets. Rather, I liken the process to “stopping for a few minutes to study the map, check that we’re heading in the right direction, and boldly continue with the journey of life.” This is important because goals set in the past are rigid and disregard any change that has happened since they were set. We change, the world changes, and fixating on goals set in the past can keep us on a course incongruent with the present.

For example, in my 2019 In Review, I didn’t even mention the real estate photography business that became my biggest and most successful effort of the year. A friend and I started the company on a whim. I didn’t think much would come of it. We were training to be professional pilots and thought we would leave Phoenix for our first flying gigs before year’s end. But the coronavirus changed everything. 2020 was suddenly the worst year in decades to be a pilot looking for a job and that real estate photography business I neglected to even mention became my main endeavor. This is precisely why I believe in setting and moving in the direction of goals, but not fixating upon them.

This year I sourced questions from Chris’ Gulliabeau’s Annual Review, a podcast episode about Naikan (the Japanese art of self-reflection), and my own intuition. As always, I wrote them into a notebook with a bunch of space for answers in between and sat down among a few quiet hours to fill in the blanks.

If you would like to follow my format, here’s the list of questions I asked:

• What did I receive this year?*

• What did I give this year?*

• What did I put my energy into this year?

• What should I put my energy into next year?

• What should I put less energy into next year?

• When I look back on this time, what will I wish I did more of?

• What went well this year?

• What didn’t go well this year?

• 3-5 goals for the following categories: Work (which I split into Writing/Website and Desert Lens), Investing, Relationships, Wellness, Learning, Travel, Fun.

*Think as broadly as possible for these questions (air, food, internet, love, help, etc.)

I won’t be sharing my answers to all these questions, but I will share a portion of them. As always (2015, 2016, 2018, and 2019), here’s what happened, what went well, what didn’t, some of my loosely held goals for 2021, and my favorite things (book, album, movie, quote, and object) this past year.

What Happened:

After five years of wondering, wandering, and writing supported by a summer job running an old log-cabin lodge next to Yellowstone National Park, I returned home to Phoenix, Arizona in the fall of 2019 with the intention of becoming a professional pilot. I figured it would take about a year to earn my commercial pilot’s license and then I’d be off to some remote corner of the world to fly bush planes for a living. However, the coronavirus brought the world to a halt in March, pushing the prospect of a new pilot finding a job an unknown amount of time into the future. I kept training anyway. I passed the checkride for private pilot’s license in May and continued instrument training into June, but eventually realized the financial hole I was digging to learn to fly was not one I would be able to fly out of for some time. So I stopped, and was desperately confused for a while.

I had begun flight school with my brother and his friend Cole. Flying wasn’t looking very promising, but Cole and I had started a real estate photography company on a whim soon after arriving in Phoenix, and his great tenacity had landed us some unexpectedly large successes throughout the first half of 2020. In June, with professional piloting a short term impossibility, we doubled-down on our business. I began what I expected to take three weeks but took over three months building a highly functional, SEO-optimized website for our company. We worked hard throughout the rest of the year, establishing ourselves as an affordable, luxury real estate photography company in Phoenix.

For much of the year, the way forward was not obvious. Between flying and this endlessly confusing web design process, I was making huge investments of time and money into things that might not pan out and neglecting my written endeavors to do so. Some crazy things were happening at home as well. During this year of social distancing, my social life was also seriously lacking. It was a tremendously trying year.

Yet, 2020 was also filled with often glimmers of golden moments:

• a spontaneous hike with one of my favorite bands

• manning the camera of a $10,000 drone with zero experience to film an episode of Taste the Nation with Padma Lakshmi

• driving home in the faint remaining light after a twilight shoot of a $5,000,000 mansion with the windows down, air rushing about, and the realization that I’m getting pretty damn good at real estate photography

• long runs across vast swathes of Arizona under the great sun

• a handful of crazy camping trips with great friends

• the indescribable feeling of freedom of my first solo flights over the desert south of Phoenix, landing at tiny airports I had never before seen among this twisted, beautiful solitude reminiscent of the movie “Mad Max” in this petrol-powered flying machine

As a metaphorical whole, 2020 felt like a sopping wet, dark, heavy blanket thrown over my head that fortunately had a multitude of tiny holes poked in it allowing enough air to breathe and letting in little, scattered rays of pure white light.

What Went Well?

• I earned my Private Pilot’s License. Flying airplanes does not come naturally to humans. A big mistake can be fatal and learning to fly is crazy expensive. Collectively, this is a near perfect recipe for stress. I’m quite proud to have survived the process and cultivated cool and calm while behind the yoke.

• Desert Lens Real Estate Photography. What was founded on a whim became my biggest project of 2020. We’ve earned a reputation in Phoenix for our “premium photography at affordable prices” and have established great relationships with some prolific realtors. It’s a fantastic, fun way to earn a living and have plenty of pockets of time to write.

• It was a great year for my body. I learned to rock climb at a local bouldering gym before the pandemic hit. I have been lifting weights, running, and biking religiously, largely as mental resets from work and the stresses of the year. We bought and installed a used sauna in my parent’s backyard and are reaping the ridiculous health benefits of saunas. My brother has been studying the human body throughout the pandemic and turned me onto mobility exercises to stay supple and functional in the long term. I am now a near-religious intermittent faster, eating two meals a day within an eight-hour window, and based on the advice of longevity experts, never-been-better blood panels, and how great it feels, suspect I am really onto something.

• My skills as a photographer and videographer improved significantly. From handling a DSLR and flying drones to working gimbals and the principles of real estate photography, I have learned much about the art of capturing light this year.

• I learned WordPress and built a tremendously complicated, custom website for Desert Lens. What I envisioned as a simple, few week endeavor grew increasingly complex as I fully realized how capable the website needed to be. After multiple redesigns, hiring a web designer to help via Upwork, and three and a half months of remarkable confusion, it was finally finished. Never has so much money been channeled through something I have built before, it feels good.

What Did Not Go Well?

• I invested a tremendous amount of time, money, and energy into becoming a professional pilot and the pandemic totally destroyed the job market. This put me into significant debt in the first half of the year, which I’ve spent the remainder of the year climbing out of through real estate photography.

• It wasn’t a great year for my written endeavors. I didn’t have the time or headspace to write the book I’ve been working on. WONDER WANDER 2020 was to be hosted in April of 2020 but was canceled due to the pandemic. I did write some deeper, more complex articles this year, but I only wrote ten pieces in 2020, making the past year my least prolific yet.

• Social life was… lacking this year. Of course, it was a hard year for all of us social beings. I have missed coffee shops, bars, and concerts deeply. The amount of eye-contact, human touch, and laughing hard with friends in my life this year was way too low.

• Traversing my lowest of lows. After I stopped flying on account of the lack of jobs, while not traveling or writing, barred from social life, in debt, living with my parents, lost months into the seemingly impossible task of building this complicated WordPress for a real estate photography business which I didn’t know if I would see a return on, I experienced one of the lowest points of my life to date. I was lost, stifled, and unable to connect with the things I love. I felt terrible. Things like exercise, saunas, late night letters, the desert, books, and the understanding of my family were essential relief during a dark time.

Some Loosely Held Goals for 2021

• Write the rough draft of the “wanderbook.” Find people experienced in selling books to help hone the idea and take it all the way.

• Grow Desert Lens into a beautiful business and stabilize it as long-term asset. Be a full-time photographer while writing the above book.

• Finally form a weekly discussion group with a diverse, interesting array of Phoenicians. Ever since gathering The Knights of the Round Stool in Silver Gate, I constantly find myself thinking about doing this again.

• Use real estate photography as paid education for furthering my skills as a photographer, videographer, and drone pilot. One of my highest goals in life is to be a creative wizard. This is a fantastic opportunity to “kill two birds with one stone,” earning a paycheck and fast tracking my skills in creative wizardry.

• Add more movement and mobility to my bodywork. Incorporate more Ido Portal like movement into my workouts, do yoga once a week, and stick to ten minutes of mobility exercises every day.

My Favorite Things of 2020

Book: Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Album: A Deeper Understanding by The War on Drugs

Movie: Fight Club (a genius undercover case for minimalism and an anti-consumer lifestyle)

Quote:

Thing: Sauna

One of the best things I discovered while working in Silver Gate, Montana was the sauna. We had this incredible wood-fired sauna along the creek of fresh snowmelt that ran through town from the surrounding mountains. At night, we would cook ourselves silly, run out and jump into the freezing creek, and stumble around under the Milky Way drunk with temperature change. Words fail to describe how much I loved this, I do not know of a reliably better way to spend an evening.

One night while I was bartending at the Range Rider’s Lodge, I got talking about saunas with someone. They told me it was scientifically proven that “using a sauna four times a week decreases your chance of death by forty percent.” I did not believe the man, but he insisted. So the following day I looked it up, and sure enough, a twenty-one-year long study in Finland on sauna use found that “for all-cause mortality, sauna bathing 2 to 3 times per week was associated with a 24 percent lower risk and 4 to 7 times per week with a 40 percent reduction in risk compared to only one sauna session per week.”

In short: saunas incredibly relaxing, de-stressing, and downright spiritual. And they also appear to be remarkably healthy.

This year, I found a like-new three person infrared sauna on OfferUp for $800. We bought and installed it in my parent’s backyard. It was utter respite during 2020’s repetitive, stressful, socially distanced days. I highly recommend finding your way into one of these hot boxes.