Reflections

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” – Søren Kierkegaard

Early each January, we pull out my planner so Lorne and I can go back through the pages to remember the events of the past year.  Like many, we find the New Year is a great time to reflect on what was accomplished in the previous year and focus on what we want to achieve going forward.

Instead of setting New Year’s resolutions or lofty goals, we feel our life would be better served by simply working on ways to tweak our existence, so we can live our best life possible right now.  And for the past few years, we have been doing this by choosing a focus word to guide us through the year.

Our “focus word” for 2024 was Immerse. 

The plan was to immerse ourselves in community, creativity, health and happiness.  Here are a few things that made our lives better in 2024:

• Community – in December 2023, after a lot of legal struggles, our complex was finally able to form our Homeowner’s Association (HOA) and Lorne was asked to serve as president of one of the committees.  This gave him a front row seat for all the decisions being made and he was able to give his input as to what we felt our community best needed.  It turned out to be the perfect way to immerse ourselves in our community.  By being a part of the HOA, we have come to know so many people, and through them, we have come to know even more. 

• Creativity – our blog has been a great creative outlet for both Lorne and I, but we have been hoping to expand a little more creatively.   So, this past year we dabbled in creating some “vlogs”.   We spent some time learning more about how to use Canva combined with how to use our new video editing program, and found the project to be so much fun, especially sharing our creative ideas together.   Since we really liked doing this and feel that we want to move in this direction, we are now ready to invest in a few new gadgets that will better help us create them.   We are hoping that by the summer we will be able to start posting them.

• Health – Lorne and I continued this past year focusing on more whole foods and we changed our schedule to two meals per day.  We intentionally switched our larger meal to the morning (around 10:30am) and our smaller meal to the evening (around 7pm).  By eating most of our calories in the morning, we have more than enough energy throughout the day, and having a smaller meal in the evening, when we are less active, means we have less to digest before bed.  Besides having more energy, we have reduced our need for snacking, lessened our sugar cravings, eliminated nighttime acid reflux, seen some weight loss, and best of all, has lowered Lorne’s blood glucose levels.  At first it was a bit weird having roast chicken or grilled pork chops in the morning, but we have come to love our epic breakfasts.

• Happiness – surprisingly, we fell short on this for 2024.  We set a plan in motion this past year to aggressively pay down the mortgage on this condo.  It’s very difficult for foreigners to acquire a mortgage in Mexico, so we were only able to qualify for something like a “Graduated Payment Mortgage”, which is a loan that provides lower monthly payments at the start (which makes it easier to qualify) but increase gradually each month.  In 2019, our initial payments started out around $1,850CAD per month and by the end of 2028, our payments were estimated to be around $3,900CAD per month, depending on the current exchange rate at that time.  We knew we needed to pay this loan down as fast as possible, so throughout 2024, we made additional payments, and by doing so, we are on track to pay this mortgage off two years early.   However, this aggressive payment plan didn’t leave any room for us to go out for dinner or take a little trip somewhere.  We are still so happy living here, but we found it a little hard this past year not having the budget to do a few fun things now and then.  But fear not…  this is on track to change in 2025.

We are very happy with all the changes we were able to make during 2024, and we know these changes will continue with us into 2025.

And speaking of 2025, after much consideration, we have decided our focus word for the upcoming year will be Balance…

This word is our inspiration and motivation for this new year.  Our focus is to better balance our life, specifically our time, our money, our mental health, as well as physical health.  And by doing so, we hope to live our best life and enjoy all that this life has to offer.