Promises of Christmas

The anticipated Christmas finally came and is almost over now just 1 hour to go and currently, fireworks are saying goodbye to Christmas with a bang of colours. Although, it was generally a happy day for me, as I was with family and there was lots of food and drink. For some reason, a lot of our neighbours gave food specially to me. It felt good to know that I am in their thoughts.

I woke up to the aroma of chicken cooking and everyone busy doing one thing or the other. Had to do some laundry first as I had planned to do it today. Then I had breakfast. After which I went to the football field in my area to watch some local football game. I love football 😄.

I got back home just before noon and was resting as I replied some texts and messages on my WhatsApp. It was then I decided to open one of the apps on my phone moon+ reader. It’s basically like a library app, where you can download books to read.

Going through my book shelf on the app, I realised there are many books I had downloaded just over a year ago hoping to read them because at that time, I had said I wanted to resume reading books as I used to the years before.

To my disappointment, I had not done what I intended to do a year ago because I didn’t read all the books I downloaded. I wasn’t happy about that. That made me to think about my reading in general, and how it had declined over the last couple of years. At the very worst, I should read at least one book a month. That’s equivalent to 12 books in a year.

That wasn’t the end of my disappointment, as I remembered there was another promise I had failed to keep. In 2015, I created an account on Duolingo because I was interested in learning Spanish. Duolingo is an app one can use to learn different languages, over the years, they have increased the number of courses to take when learning a particular language. And for the past 6 years, I have only been able to successfully complete unit one for the Spanish lessons out of 10 units. And only 37% into the lessons in unit two.

It was this slow progress in learning is as a result of inconsistency on my part, that prompted me to promise myself a year to do better this year and be more consistent. A year later and I am still where I was a year ago. The best I have done this year was a 37-day streak between August and September. And I spent those times revising all the lessons I had learnt in unit one. On the 38th day, I had gone back to default and since then, I haven’t practiced any lessons.

I spent the day thinking about how I had failed at keeping the promises I made to myself. It hasn’t been an easy year for me, but that is no excuse, as I feel I could have done better in my personal growth. That is not to say I had not learnt a lot this year, but I could have learnt more. And the worse part about learning is that you tend to forget what you have learnt over time if you do not put them to practice.

I ended up making another promise to read more books than I did in the past two years, and also practice Spanish and be consistent so that in a year’s time, I’d be more fluent than I am now. And this time, I hope to keep my promise to myself as personal growth is important.

I am sure many of us had a great day today. Happy New year in advance. 🎄

Thank You For Reading 🖤🖤