By Ethan Maurice | January 31, 2022

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

While a new year is just an arbitrarily chosen point in Earth’s lap around the sun, it is also a regular reminder of transition. And as transitions tend to cause us to pause and reflect, a new year seems a sweet, cosmically-tuned reminder to pause, ”pull our heads out of the water,” and look around.

I don’t believe in resolutions or fixating on specific goals. 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.” Goals can help us achieve what they’re aimed at, but also become blinders to other opportunities that arise in the present. I attempt to walk a middle path, aiming my awareness at certain things, but not fixating upon them.

Same as last year, I sourced questions for this year’s review from Chris Gulliabeau’s Annual Review and a podcast about Naikan (the Japanese art of self-reflection). I dabbled in the annual review processes of a few WONDER WANDER 2021 participants as well, but won’t get into those prompts here as I’ve yet to fully explore them myself (I was galavanting about Colombia with friends at the turn of the year and just couldn’t find the time).

If you’re interested in following my format, here’s the list of questions I asked. I wrote and answered each in a notebook among a few quiet hours one night in a rented for the month room in Medellín.

• 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 did not 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 share all my answers to these questions here, but will summarize a bit and share a few below. Over time, these published yearly reviews are becoming increasingly interesting (for me at least) to look back upon, charting changes in the ways I spend my time, place my awareness, and what I decide is worth sharing. Similar to past published reviews (2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2020), here’s what happened, what went well, what didn’t, some of my loosely held goals for 2021, and my favorite things of this past year.

What Happened:

After reading back across previous years in review and sitting down to write this one, I really see the course of my life impacted by external circumstance — namely — the coronavirus pandemic. Not in a negative way, but in a way I would never have thought to go without external prompting:

I returned to Phoenix in September of 2019, planning to become a pilot and fly off to lands unknown. I figured I’d be here for about a year. Almost two and a half years later, I’m still here and co-own a real estate photography business based here in the valley of the sun.

Desert Lens and Denver Lens were definitely my main endeavor of 2021, by far the thing I poured the most energy and awareness into. Thus far, it’s going real well. It’s been significantly more financially fruitful than any previous endeavor and has been a surprisingly sweet juxtaposition of creative work, daily pockets of time, and a large degree of geographic freedom. I’m getting pretty damn good at all aspects of real estate imaging: photography, videography, flying drones, using 360 cameras, and all that jazz. I’m also doing all sorts of people and culture things: interviewing photographers, training them, meeting with go-getters who run other businesses, and working rooms of real estate events, which for a natural introvert, has been well-rounding as well.

Laying the foundation of this real estate photography business has required the bulk of my focus, and my writing output suffered in 2021. While stoked with the musings of a dozen Late Night Letters this year, I only published nine articles to the site. The book I started the year optimistically working at has been set aside for a time, such a hefty creative endeavor seems to require the mental space for my unconscious mind to work at it, but that unconscious processing tends to work upon the plethora of pressing creative needs of an expanding real estate photography business.

That said, 2021 was also spiritual, philosophical, and quite rad. Books like The Denial of Death, How to Change Your Mind, and The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying rocked the socks of my largest and deepest perspectives and views. I hosted WONDER WANDER 2021 in a cabin outside Kanab, Utah with a dozen others, and it was one of the peak experiences of my life to date. I also spent two summertime weeks in Silver Gate, Montana, a week California road tripping (including two legendary nights hanging with Ed Buryn, one of my greatest heroes, and crashing in his bunkhouse), and thirty-seven days spread across Colombia playing digital nomad in Medellin and exploring a good chunk of the country with friends around the new year.

What Went Well?

• Real estate photography. Our revenue grew five times over this year, we opened a second location in Denver, and have big plans for 2022. My camera-wielding skills improved dramatically. If you google “real estate photography” in Phoenix, our website shows up first in the organic results (which I am somehow responsible for!).

• WONDER WANDER 2021. I feel this review sums it up better than I can:

“Wonder Wander is a self-growth extravaganza mixed with making amazing friends in a gorgeous place. We laughed, we cried, we stared into each other’s eyes. We gazed at the milky way and danced until the sun came up (almost). Vulnerability led to pretty incredible breakthroughs with basically perfect strangers. How to summarize such an event? Pure magic.”

• Treated my body super well. My work requires a lot of sitting these days. Since experiencing my first ever bout of back pain last year, I decided it was time to reexamine how I treat my body. I learned to sit better and got into yoga, mobilization, and stretches that intentionally (and effectively) counteract sitting. My brother, who possesses deep fathoms of fitness knowledge, also just redesign my gym-based workouts in the style of @kneesovertoesguy.

• Met a bunch of remarkable humans. This year’s wonderwanderers, Ed Buryn, a fascinating cast of charters in Colombia, some super successful business people, and a couple of cool Phoenicians.

• Climbed out of a dark hole! Stuck at my parent’s place in debt from flight school with no prospects of flying during a global pandemic with some crazy stuff going down, 2020 was rough. I worked super hard this year, some little investments panned out well, and am well out of that flight school debt. I shed a bunch of emotional baggage from the pandemic as well, feel more '“spiritually expansive” than ever before, and again relish in the bulk of my days.

What Did Not Go Well?

Since getting pinched by the pandemic, I got into this work-work-work mode to get financially, geographically, and functionally free again. I really worked my ass off in 2021.

All “did not go well” answers in this annual review had the same root cause: they didn’t receive the time and energy, there just wasn’t enough left. I would like better balance, but also suspect I am laying the groundwork for something big that may free up a whole lot of future time — we’ll see.

• The “WANDERBOOK.” I began outlining this book in the summer of 2019. In September of 2019, I returned to Phoenix and entered the flight school into the coronavirus pandemic debacle. I haven’t had the time and space to regularly work on it since. It’s still in me and still wants out.

• The blog. I wanted to write more this year, but again, didn’t have the time. There are a dozen articles backed up in my noggin’. By the numbers, the site’s reach has stalled a bit, down from a height of 87,000 page views in 2019 to 61,000 in 2021.

• Social life in Phoenix was lacking. I frequented the Downtown Phoenix Run Club, made a handful of good friends, and had some fun nights out, but didn’t have time to develop true local tribe.

Last Year’s Loosely Held Goals for 2021

• Write the rough draft of the “wanderbook.” Just didn’t have the time with the running and gunning of the real estate photography business.

• Grow Desert Lens into a beautiful business and stabilize it as a long-term asset. While nothing is safe and secure in this universe, this went quite well.

• Finally form a weekly discussion group with a diverse, interesting array of Phoenicians. I ended up forming something very similar via Zoom with some wonderful humans, it has adapted and evolved a few times since and is still rolling!

• Use real estate photography as paid education for furthering my skills as a photographer, videographer, and drone pilot. I’ve still got plenty of room to grow, but I’m getting pretty damn good.

• Add more movement and mobility to my bodywork. Weekly yoga, I stretch for a few minutes when I wake up and before I go to bed most days, and also sit better at desks.

Some Loosely Held Goals for 2022

• Expand the real estate photography business to a third location and get all three pumping. This will require a lot of web design, handbook writing, branding, tightening up of a million little things, photography, training others, and who knows what else. It’s creative, a different sort of adventure, and I’m sorta betting it will be worth it. Full send!

• Write a dozen articles, a dozen Late Night Letters, a third PDF guide, and create three YouTube videos. I’m going to focus on breathing life into the blog and experiment with weaving videography and spoken word this year.

• Host WONDER WANDER 2022. WONDER WANDER 2021 was grand, this is an absolute must.

• Get into the financial position to buy a Burynian pad. Ed Buryn worked the multi-family property into his life so beautifully that it is both a haven of fascinating folk and the key that allowed him to vagabond about Europe and the USA so often that he wrote the book on both (literally, click the links). If the time and place are right, I’d like to be able to follow suit.

• Give my best to @kneesovertoesguy workouts and get super powerful, flexible, and robust. I was once told, “you’re addicted to exercise” by the Buddhist leader of a meditation retreat. It won’t be difficult to show up for, but this is a completely new way of working out for me.

• Take a month-plus trip abroad. I have long wanted to write and “digital nomad” while learning to surf.

• Celebrate, expand, and be in love. These are the pillars of my current sort of spirituality. Will have to expand on them somewhere more spacious than the bullet point of a yearly review!

My Favorite Things of 2021

Book: The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

Album: The Empyrean by John Frusciante

Quote:

Thing: Libby

Libby is an app that allows you to rent audiobooks absolutely free with your library card number.

Shooting real estate photography in Phoenix the bulk of the year, I did a lot of driving and listened to half a dozen audiobooks after getting the app in the latter half of the year. Often, you have to wait a bit to get the most popular books, but with a handful on hold and they trickle into your life over time in the best way.