You did what now?
If you’ve been around me any length of time you know how I love planners – the whole planner hobby has been one of mine for years. (When I say “hobby” I mean the fun decorating stuff as opposed to just using a planner to plan things like a normal person.) I’ve always spent the last bit of December reviewing the old year and getting ready to set goals for the new.
I noticed over time that I tended to set the same goals over and over and not even remotely achieve them. I was half-assing it at best…no, quarter-assing, if we’re being honest… okay, a mere sliver of my ass was involved. I looked back over various years and various detailed plans that just sort of went nowhere, and how crappy I always felt when I gave up on them or started then bailed. It is in my nature to bail – that’s something I’ve battled with my whole life.
Then the beginning 2022 came about and I decided screw it. No lists of core values! No 22 in 2022! No life satisfaction wheels or words of the year! We’ll just see what I accomplish when I throw all expectation to the wind. I used my planner only for keeping track of the date and appointments and let the rest slide.
How’d That Work Out For You?
To be brutally honest: No worse and no better than any other year. 2022 was just as much clown shoes as the last few years have been – even if you scrape off the scuzzy layer of toxicity that is the state of the world, my personal life was neither a triumph nor a tragedy.
But I still felt bad that I hadn’t done anything – with the added guilt that in the absence of regular goals shouldn’t I have been recharging, resting, re-something? I did none of those. I blundered around like I was taking blindfolded, possibly drunken swings at the existential piñata. (Existential Piñata: new band name?) I was aimless and felt even more angst than usual.
So…what conclusions did you draw?
From a strictly pragmatic and rather cynical perspective: If I’m going to feel bad about the year no matter what I do/don’t do, I might as well do the thing that’s more fun, which for me is playing with goals and plans and habit tracking and all those things, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll get some things done while I’m at it.
From a more…optimistic? perspective, it has given me a lot of food for thought regarding why I repeatedly choose goals that I abandon yet keep going back every year. None of them seem unreasonable. They’re all things that matter to me, or at least I want them to.
I’ve never been what you would call “disciplined” or “pro-active.” I freely admit I sit on my ass until I’m forced to do most things – the combination of mental issues I get to enjoy daily creates a nice sludge of executive dysfunction (I know I need to do this, but I just can’t!) and feelings/fear of failure (I’m just going to mess it up, so why should I even try?). It’s never been something I liked about myself, but I am at least used to it. Believe me, I’ve shadow worked this shit from here to the dark side of the Moon; I’m not saying I can’t change, I’m just saying I understand how deeply rooted these things are and that clearly my prior approaches have not worked.
Okay, What Are You Going to Do This Year?
Well, I’m not in a rush, that’s for sure. I’m using January as Nature intends: To wait, to think, to make wiser decisions before acting. I’ve been using an approach where you rate all these different areas of your life (relationships, spiritual, financial, health and wellness, and so on) and then rate where you’d like them to be at the end of the year; then you pick out a couple that have a really big gap between current and future, and come up with ways to help make that happen. No one part of life happens in a vacuum. I created a personal covenant with the Goddess that defines these areas and leaves room for me to figure out how to improve them with more specific goals. (I’m a Unitarian Universalist, covenants are kind of our jam.)
But again, there’s no hurry. It’s not like time actually resets at New Year’s midnight. It’s a human-made marker that we use to orient ourselves in time, but it’s not the only possible marker. I use the seasonal cycle as a guide – first we think and plan, then we get a-moving, then we reap the fruit of our choices, then we rest.
Right now I’m in the preparation stage and considering how I want life to look/feel at the end of 2023. What will it take to get me there? What am I willing to sacrifice? And am I medicated enough to try? Stay tuned.