As longer term readers may know and anticipate, usually at the end of December or beginning of January I post what I believe my goals for the next year will be.
In years past, this has been an agonizing grind at times - agonizing because I endlessly worry that I am going to get things wrong rather than right and somehow miss "the thing I am supposed to be doing". But the years 2023 and 2024 with their combination of two layoffs, a death, and a relocation have somewhat put that sort of thing to bed.
The other factor - a reality that I do not care to reflect on but is absolutely true - is that I am likely reaching what will be the last third of my life, given the male genetics on both sides of my family. To be frank, time grows shorter, not longer
To help focus my thinking for the year - something I consciously put off this December - I revisited the book Essentialism over a two period at the end of 2024.
Written in 2011, by Greg McKeown and recommended by my weight coach The Berserker, it is a book which attempts to give guidance to the question of "What should I be spending my life on?" (A review from 2021 is here).
When I originally started this post, it was intended as a one-time listing of my goals and how I got to them (or sort of got to them) for 2025. But as I thought about it more, I realized that this might very well indeed make for a good longer in depth series:
1) To help me really walk back through what the outcome of this two-day period of thinking and review was to see if I really "got it";
2) To give myself the intellectual luxury of thinking through these things on longer term (rather than just rushing through it and calling it good.
3) As a wider aspiration, I realize that most of my readership are likely in the "latter" stages of their lives. Perhaps they have figured out what their essentials are (and I can benefit from that) or even that in my wanderings on the subject, it can help others to think about the true essentials in their own lives, no matter where they find themselves along the journey.
From McKeown's Introduction:
"To harness the courage we need to get on the right path, it pays to reflect on how short life really is and what we want to accomplish in the little time we have left. As poet Mary Oliver wrote 'Tell me, what is it you plan to do/with your one wild and precious life?'"
The only sensible choice, argues McKeown, is to find the essentials - and do that.
As you might expect, I don't dwell on my past much at all, well at least in terms of what I have done or failed to do. I'm pretty good at telling myself that given the same set of choices and circumstances to do over, I would likely have done them exactly the same way and then moving on.
ReplyDeleteLikewise, I don't dwell much on my future either. I don't like agonizing over choices that haven't even come over my horizon. I just tell myself that I will deal with them when they arrive, as I have done all my life thus far, and not worry about them until then.
Thus, for the most part, I focus only on today or my near term. I have a big project to build in the spring and a couple long vacations in the planning stages for next year but other than those things, I'm mostly planning out the rest of my day today.
A wise man once told me, "Ignorance is bliss."
To reflect on life and how to live it may require wisdom at least, for my part that trait took years to develop and I would still not call it wisdom......just the school of hard knocks......:) Good luck TB.
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