A reoccurring conversation that I have with my mom at the start of the holiday season is discussing about how people decorate their homes (if they celebrate Christmas). We talk about how even though there are some who put up crazy variations of lights and matching ornaments around their tree; ours is a simple Christmas tree from Costco that’s about 10 years old with mismatching ornaments all around. Do our ornaments follow a theme? Absolutely not. But what makes it so special is each ornament itself; all having a snapshot of a memory in time with a different story. As we put each ornament on the tree, we take a moment to talk about the particular memory from the past. From decorating our house the past couple of days and in reflecting about this project currently, I think this is also another wonderful method of self-reflection as another year comes to an end in the coming weeks.

After taking the time to read over all the interviews from these last couple months, I wanted to use this post to reflect on my journey with this project. Of course I could have just interviewed one more person, but my cat also doesn’t have too much to say despite being near the Christmas tree all the time now.

I think the way I constructed the interviews was just the right amount of questions and the right amount of time. There were 6 questions segments, which were of the following:

• This or That
• Five Facts of Fun
• Drop a Bop
• Debate Time
• Some Deeper Small Talk
• The Final Spotlight

Each interview took about 15 minutes, depending how detailed each interviewee wanted to go with the question. I think this time length kept the interview fun and relaxing, without having the pressure for those to think too hard about the question. I also found that some people wanted to express themselves more than others, but that’s okay! That’s also part of the project and each interview captured who that person was in that moment of time. I realized that these interviews also gave some people a reason to talk about a particular fact about themselves, as I felt that some of the things mentioned in some interviews would just be too out of the ordinary for regular conversation.

I think my favourite part of each interview was hearing about ‘Debate Time’ as everyone had a different perspective on each silly prompt. My favourite interview that I did was probably with my grandfather, as the conversation was completely different than anticipated; I think there was a lot more that I could take away from that interview than if I just followed the structure of a causal conversation.

If I could change anything about the interview, I think I would integrate more questions that would then contain all 5 senses. I don’t think anyone really talked about smell or touch, but I think those would be fun to integrate into ‘This or That’! If there wasn’t a time restriction with posting each interview, I would also get each interviewee to contribute a photo or some other type of media to their post.

Overall, I think the main thing I would to highlight from what each person said is recapping everyone’s ‘Final Spotlight’. I think there’s some really good perspective from what each person said and I think there is a lot to think about further with some of these prompts. I hope that some of you can take away some of these thoughts with reflecting this past year and setting new personal goals for 2023. Perhaps it’s time to disconnect online and start reconnecting offline…

This is PROJECT: Offline and thank you so much for following along on this journey. Happy holidays and all the best for the new year.

The Final Spotlight

If you had the final opportunity to say anything to the world, what would you say?

Things can change very quickly and can happen unexpectedly, so live in the moment, appreciate what you currently have and enjoy it while you can.

Stop focusing so much on the things that don’t matter. Sometimes you need to step out and look at the big picture.

Please, just be kinder to people.

Get out of bed. Don’t take it literally, but get out of bed.

Stop waiting on other people to do it, when you can start doing it yourself. I’m thinking more about the environment; don’t wait for other people to do it cause if everyone thinks like that, then nothing is going to get done. That reminds me of The Lorax quote. “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

Nobody cares, really. Nobody cares, go do your thing. Don’t take yourself too seriously. You probably care more than everybody else.

Cherish the smaller moments because they’re often the most valuable ones in the end. And always show your love to those you care about, as often as you can.

Take more time to reflect on what you have going for you. Because, obviously when you make goals for yourself, especially long term goals, it can seem like they’re really far away. But if you narrow it down to where you are now, you can realize how far you’ve come to get to where you are now…

Climate change is real, can we please do something about it cause I want to live past 2030. If I could shout that off the roof tops I would. Please, COP 27 is happening right now and it just feels like false promises again and I just wanna have a future. Not to end it on a sad note, but that’s what I would scream to everyone and like, bang into everyone’s head, cause please climate change is so, so real. We are feeling the affects of it now everywhere around the world. So, can we please do something about it?!

I would say that life is too short to be stressing about the little things. You need to take one step at a time with anything you do and not be down on yourself on the sense that… I find that a lot of people in life, they mess up something good and search for something better, to only end up with something worse. And to count your blessings, and life is too short to be stressing about the little things, so. My main message is make the best of where you are.