2025 May Bring More Opportunities for Physical Exploration While Malta and Work Stay Constant

"And here is your card, valid until December 2025," the nice lady at the Malta residency office explained as she handed over my new residency card. And just like that, I am welcome to another year of living the slice of the Mediterranean paradise. Also exactly one year after delivering my first post from this little island, I am here to summarize the year before in an always vain attempt to predict the upcoming year's trajectory. As is always the case with the first of the year, checking off what has been completed helps to focus the mind on some truly new experiences that can still be had.

First, what will likely remain the same? After jumping into a new career as a salesman, this year will have much less in store when it comes to career changes. While convincing parents that shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for a few hours of educational consulting Zoom calls has been tough on persuasive communication and conscience, delivering those Zoom calls has been much less stressful if the hours have been quite unpredictable. As I noted when I transitioned from the sales to the essay mentoring role, talk is abstract, but skills in crafting a logical essay are concrete, with visual output to confirm.

That is not to say there is no career growth in the current role. The struggle I had last year balancing the concrete and abstract students' messages in those essays will be something I continue to work on in the year ahead. As I work 14-hour days over Christmas and New Year's to meet last-minute review requests in time for deadlines, it is worth taking some time off and reflecting on how to be efficient, set boundaries, and deliver decent results with minimal time. If these struggles remain in December 2025, I will again be stressed out while everyone else enjoys the most relaxed and festive time of the year.

But, in all honesty, even if I still struggle with work-life balance at the end of next year, Malta's presence will be worth it. In the past year, I have not only seen the beauty of the country's tourist high season, when every day can be a swimming day in crystal clear seawater. I also saw the country's relaxed attitude, in life and handling of its increasing number of foreign migrants. While cultural distances remain, the kaleidoscope of ethnicities that coinhabit the island makes me, a product of global migrations, feel deeply at home and not estranged by minority status. 

In the new year, I will continue embracing this ever-internationalizing island, and find time to explore the root cause of that internationalization: its geographical proximity to a diversity of different countries and cultures. Last year, the only trip that truly took me to a new cultural outlook was a weekend trip to Tunisia. This year, especially in the first half when students are not yet geared up for university application work, I look forward to getting more airline mileage in, jetting off to the Middle East for a long-awaited that had been planned since before the COVID-19 pandemic.

And the Middle East should be by no means the only place I should get in touch with from Malta. Seeing how the country is being shaped by its increasingly visible African population, I should find time to explore more south of the Sahara as well. Having left the continent as a resident nearly a decade ago now, I am keen to see it once again. Particularly by finding a way to get to the likes of Nigeria, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast, I will get to see how a region troubled by the perpetual threat of extremism and governmental mismanagement can somehow still maintain its youthful vibrancy.

Of course, Malta being Europe, exploring more of the continent to the north is in order as well. A recent day trip to Sicily was a reminder that geographical proximity and historical relationships are never guaranteed to correlate with cultural similarity. Despite top-down attempts at institutional and economic convergence, so many cities and countries will be different from Malta and each other. Even as someone who proudly backpacked through almost every country from the UK to Ukraine, understanding those differences requires more visits across many years.

What about plans outside traveling and working? Only time can tell what those trips will bring. More journeys to foreign lands will surely bring more topics and opportunities for writing, even the research kind that I so struggled with during my Ph.D. years. Meeting new people in new places may bring business opportunities that can be a side gig to my main employment as an educational consultant. But none of these will materialize unless I put myself out there physically. After nearly a year of Zoom calls, it is time to face the physical real world.