In 2012, I stumbled upon the No-Comfort Zone Challenge and decided to give it a go. It has been an interesting year! The weekly posts for that drew a fair bit of interest while keeping me focused on trying new things or new ways of approaching old ones.

I travelled to Massachusetts on my own. The last time I went on a trip alone was in 1979! So that was a challenge, but also dealing with the fear that I had acquired after my illness four years ago. And I was successful!

I had some successful poetry submissions over the course of the year AND a couple of encouraging rejections (!). In the summer, I signed up for a course through Coursera, Modern & Contemporary American Poetry, expecting something not too challenging. After all, it was a free course. But come September when the course got underway, I became immersed in the 20th century of American poetry, and would remain so for the next 10 weeks. Along with some 36,000 other students from all over the world. What an amazing experience!

I also worked on a lot of fears about health and aging. I am still working on that! But I feel like I’ve come a long way since last January. For that I owe thanks to the No-Comfort Zone Challenge that I found through MargeKatherine at the Inside Out Cafe blog.

And at the same time, visitors from 82 countries visited my blog! Wow! I have not made any resolutions for 2013 yet. I look forward to more poetry, more challenges too. At the end of January, I’ll be doing the Intro to Philosophy course, also through Coursera. That sounds interesting too!

Happy New Year everybody, and thanks for visiting me!

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 6,100 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 10 years to get that many views.

Click here to see the complete report.

Related articles

• 2012 – A year of discomfort (margekatherine.com)
• 2012 in review for my poetry blog (seapoetry.wordpress.com)