MARTIN L

Category: Listening to Life

  • 2026: The Year of Creation

    It’s time to stop consuming, and start creating.

    I’m excited to announce that 2026 is officially Martin’s Year of Creation! The Year of Creation is a year-long ethos to embrace the systems of creation, and see how creating, and not consuming changes the perspectives in your life.

    Presented by Founding Partner CreativeSystems of America, the Year of Creation will focus on three key themes that I will bring to myself and others throughout the whole year of 2026.

    Create Connection

    As its name suggests, Create Connection focuses on creating connections and communities within the spaces that I am present in. Connection is a reflection of who we are, who we care about, and what we can ultimately be. This year, we create connection by opening ourselves to the different portals of our identity – sharing knowledge, ideas, and strong emotions with loved ones, and strangers.

    Creating connection revolves around building the opportunity to interlink with others through open portals. We must ask ourselves: where can I be more mindful of opportunities to be more present with people in our lives? This may take form in written text, in-person gatherings, or a simple sought of solace of the vocalization of our problems. However this may present, it is an invitation of cognizance of life’s many small moments; ones that may present opportunities to listen and share.

    Create Spirit

    Create Spirit revolves around the ideal of an omnipresent idea that arises from our physical being. Many of us, myself included collect and curate objects that become a part of our mental and physical being. Creating spirit focuses on arising those thoughts outside of the object itself, where we build on the emotions and thoughts that come from the object and isolate it from physicality. The goal with this theme is to remove our attachments to the physical, and create a spirit using the emotions that we bring with us from the physical world into our mental sphere. In the end, our inner thoughts decompose with our physical thoughts, but the objects themselves stay stagnant – a reflection on how holding onto the past hurts the present you, evolving with life.

    Self-expression is a powerful thing, and when we create spirit, we begin to move beyond our physical attachment to objects, and towards creating an attachment to what those objects represent. We can begin to let go of the physical and enter the mental, securing our creative identity without the need for the physical.

    Create Myself

    Finally, we must embody the creation of oneself during the year of creation. While we may never erase the past, we gain an opportunity to look beyond and see how our inner self becomes one with our outer self.

    “Do we really create identity?” you may be asking. The motive is not to force the creation of oneself. Instead, you should be seeking out ways to create opportunities and safe spaces for our real identities to exist.

    We take the moment this year to see what we really want to do with our limited lives. This is the year to rid oneself of the parasocial reflection highlighted through our social media accounts. Instead of following defined paths, we take the opportunity to see where new footsteps can lead towards. This is the year we omit goals in favor of direction.

    What does this look like? We omit the consumption of what’s popular, and seek new explorations of what can be popular in our identities. We rid oneself of the pleasures of “what do you want?” and embrace standing up to what feels right in that moment. Rumination and self-reflection is pushed to ensure our movements align with our value. This is the pivotal moment to define how our value reflects upon ourselves.

    Official Logo

    To celebrate the Year of Creation, I have created a special logo to represent the theme. Although simple, the logo is a cumulation of creative enterprises emerging together to provide a graphical representation of the identity of the year.

    The logo is comprised of three separate hard blocks stacked on top of each other, each representing a creative theme for the year. Gray is a neutral palette for new colors in life – a Connection for Creation. Blue is for our liberty – the Spirit to Create. Finally, Yellow, at the bottom, represents the backbone for creation – the mind of oneself. Each block is arranged at various angles related to 26, symbolizing the year 2026. Stacking each block provides context for each theme’s strong identity, but the immersion of all in the center provides a reprieve of loneliness – each block strengthens one another. The text, composed of uppercase Helvetica blocks, provides a clear backdrop for the year’s blessings; a clear path forward for creation.

    Special thanks to our partners at CreativeSystems of America for the inspiration and logo copyrighting.

  • Walking into 2026

    It’s time to review my 2026 walking goals! Every single year I do a major walking challenge. My main reasons are:

    1 . Fill up my Strava map. I religiously look at my Strava map often and I like the new orange lines that pop up after each workout.

    2. Explore new or familiar places by foot. I find that you don’t notice the small details about your local neighborhoods by car or bus. Bikes are a bit slower but still suffer from the same perception issue, and running for me is just focusing on keeping a low heart rate, so not perceptive at all.

    3. Add novelty to an otherwise plain activity. Walking can be pretty boring, and adding a challenge aspect motivates me to walk more.

    My 2025 Walking Challenge

    To be quite transparent, I just made this walking challenge thing up this year. But in some way, I’ve always had an athletic goal linked to my motivations above. The walking challenges are an rebrand of sorts to those goals.

    Last year, my main goal was to complete two main tasks.

    • Walk at least two miles each day (720 miles). Technically, I did not “walk” 720 miles last year. However, if you include my “hiking” workouts, I greatly exceed this number. If we’re being frank, hiking is just walking in more rugged places. So did I complete the challenge? No, but also yes.
    • Complete the San Francisco Crosstown Trail. I still have six miles left of the trail before I can claim (buy) my commemorative item. Alas, I only went back to San Francisco once last year, and unfortunately I made no progress with this trail.

    My Strava Year in Sport.

    Although I didn’t complete either of these challenges, I am glad I put them in the back of my brain, because it made me realize how inconsistent I can be with walking.

    My 2026 Walking Challenges

    You may be wondering: what’s coming up in 2026? Here are my challenges for the upcoming year.

    1. Walk at least two miles each day (720 miles). Yes, the same goal is coming back! Two miles for me is around 35 minutes of walking per day, which is totally doable. Any remaining mileage I fail to accrue will be donated to Girls on the Run Bay Area, my 2026 partner charity.
    2. Complete the Long Branch to Hamilton Link. The Long Branch to Hamilton Link is a line that will link my Hamilton Strava activities with my Toronto activities, completing a continuous line through the Greater Toronto Area. This will involve me walking from Long Branch all the way to Downtown Hamilton. A progress tracker will be updated on my website! This is a part of a greater goal to have connecting activities from Hamilton to Oshawa.
    3. Line 6 Finch West. In 2023, I successfully walked all of the TTC system in operation (Lines 1,2, and 4), completing the still un-opened Line 5 in 2024 as well. Since Line 6 is now open, I will also be completing this line very soon!
    4. Line 3 Scarborough. It may have closed two years ago, but the line is still incomplete in my heart. I will also be completing this line this year, although I do have Kennedy – Lawrence East already done.
    5. Finish the Crosstown Trail. The Crosstown Trail will finally be mine this year. I’ve never been to the Bayview (driven through it) and this trail is my one chance to see a new part of the city that I love so much.

    An example of a Line Walk. Each photo corresponds to a station on the Eglinton Crosstown.

    What is Girls on the Run Bay Area?

    Girls on the Run Bay Area is a charity dedicated to providing opportunities to young girls to get outdoors and embrace the impact of physical activity for a healthy, well-rounded lifestyle. I’m excited to partner with them this year as a part of my commitment to support Bay Area youth. You can learn more about Girls on the Run Bay Area here.

    I will be providing a monthly update on my goals on the Discussions page.

  • It’s the end of the year!

    Well no, it’s December 8th as I write this, but 2026 is almost around the corner. This however, is terrifying for a number of reasons:

    1. I am getting older. My stamina is weaker, sometimes I get back pain? No one told me getting older sucked 🙁
    2. I am still pretty young. My aunt and uncle thought I was like two years younger because I still get acne, so is life really that bad?
    3. I am still not living life that much. FOMO? I’ve heard of her and I still have it while simultaneously doing nothing. I stayed at home all day doing stuff and I think cooking and cleaning took up four hours of that. Kinda crazy!

    Overall, 2025 was not a great year for me, but 2026 will be amazing! I can’t say for sure but I will work on that. I also didn’t even go fall hiking this fall, kind of a flop if you ask me.

    This December, I hope to finish my series: MBTA thoughts before I forget them all, but I appreciate you for reading my words on text. If the sentences seem pretty rambly, it’s because I don’t read my paragraphs back and fix sentence structures.

  • It’s okay to like Benson Boone.

    In a world full of weenies, I’m a Benson Booner. I love Benson Boone because he can do backflips and he lives life. IDK why y’all are hating when you don’t even have the arm strength or flexibility to do a back flip. Get back to me when you come up with a incredible ability to sing as a soprano.

    That being said, I’m not saying his discography isn’t bad. There’s some hidden gems, but most of his songs are bad. This doesn’t mean that HE should be disliked because he has done some amazing covers.

    At the end of the day, I am telling everyone to stop hating people because their discography sucks. Have a great day!

  • Two months later: Embracing the silly life

    Around two months ago, I decided to embrace the silly life by creating silly goals for myself. Today, I am here to provide a update to this article, and reflect on whether or not these goals had an impact on how I live my life.

    For May, I chose goals that were a bit easier to accomplish to ease me in (for example, talking to a stranger, which I do all the time). It was a great way to ease me into this experience as it did remind me to put more of my focus onto searching for these types of experiences. Unfortunately for me, it was also a bit too easy to accomplish these goals, as I finished all of my goals by early May, and the mindset flew out of the window after I no longer needed to look at a list of goals.

    In June, emboldened by May’s progress, I created six goals in a variety of topic areas. These included things like: “Have a picnic with friends” and “Stay off social media for twelve hours”. I only accomplished two out of the six goals this month, mainly due to a very busy schedule that took these goals out of my mind. Overall, I will say that June was not very successful for this reason alone, as I didn’t encompass the silly mindset.

    Lessons

    1. Create goals that don’t depend on other people to accomplish: your goals cannot be contingent on the existence of other people helping you accomplish your goals. The goal of these goals are to embrace creativity
    2. Make it easy, make it hard: your goals should challenge you, but also be approachable in steps. Don’t force yourself to climb up a floor without building the staircase first.
    3. Keep the silly top of mind: It can be hard to embrace the silly energy without prioritizing it. Since it’s a mindset, keeping it in focus by incorporating it into your life is a must.

    Overall, I am still continuing this experiment throughout the summer, and as always, I am inviting y’all to join into the adventure! My goal for July and August is to incorporate this reflection into my life, and get a bit sillier for once!