Happy New Year, everyone! I thought I would start the year off right, with a blog entry that is personal, confessional, and embarrassing. One of those posts that I will totally laugh at a year from now. So here goes.My half birthday is January 2nd. I think most normal people stop noticing their half birthdays after the age of eight. But since mine is so close to the start of the new year, my half birthday inevitably becomes a period of constructive self-evaluation or mid-year/new-year crisis, depending on how you look at it.
I have a weakness for slicing and dicing my life into small goals and projects, then getting a little bored of them. This is evidenced by my on-again, off-again relationship with learning Mandarin Chinese, the books I've put down and only sometimes rediscovered, my short but brilliant affair with scrapbooking, and my tendency to push multitasking to its breaking point.* The good news is that life is abundant; the not-so-good news is that I need to make sense of it all.
Making sense of things and plotting out plans are what I do for a living, but I have never successfully applied that degree of rigor and structure to my personal life. I've always felt that there's something suspiciously sterile about regarding your life as you would an organizational process, but the issue I've struggled with most is that the objectives in my personal life are never as obvious or as constant as they are in the professional world -- personal goals are never as clear-cut in why they're important and to what degree they need to be achieved.
So my current experiment in answering the question "how do I live better?" is to step back, way back. I know this is going to sound incredibly silly, but my plan is to evaluate myself and plan for myself as if I were my own pet. I am going to buy a 2008 planner and prescribe to myself everything that I need to be cared for, groomed, healthy, hydrated, debt-free, well-read, sane (this is the descriptor I'm using to rationalize my daily dose of reality television) and conversant in Mandarin Chinese.
The reason I think this might work is that combines the rigor and accountability of the corporate world with the TLC of a normal human relationship. No judgment or blame when I fall off the bandwagon, just honest self-scrutiny about why that original approach in scheduling or prioritization failed when it came into contact with who I am and what is important to me. An example: I know I go through phases with my projects, so why not build in some variety into my schedule, studying Chinese on Mondays and Wednesdays and alternating with something else? It may well be the desperate pop psychology of a home-office hermit, but I have nothing to lose and everything to gain (or at the very least, "hydration").
* I find that bystanders who choose to comment are especially horrified by the number of minimized documents, folders, and programs I keep at the bottom of my Windows desktop. To their credit, the carnage can get up to three rows deep, not counting the number of tabs I have open on Firefox and definitely not counting all the feeds I have open on Netvibes.
3 comments:
i totally celebrate my half birthday!! in fact, in 06, my friend and i celebrated halfway between our half birthdays and baked a cake that was half chocolate and half vanilla and brought it to a party. while the party crowd was happy to indulge, i think we were the only two beaming at our "creativity."
Good to hear that I'm not alone :)
Hey, there's the widget! Where's Eli. Great writing Sheena, I'm jealous of how well you write. Anyways a comment on your big question "how do i live better?" This has an underlying pattern of living a life of standard and expectations. The word "better" feels like its definition is up for interpretation? Therefore, it can propel you in a never-ending cycle and always feeling worse. My question right now is "how can I be more authentic"? I feel solely responsible to determine what this answer is.
Then again to contradict myself a bit and pose more questions, I'm a fan of the questions that are determined to ensure that two opposing forces co-exist (like yin and yang). For example, "how can I truly be myself AND stretch myself to serve others?" In our world, life is full of these opposing pairs: life and death, work and personal life, self and others, etc. When people only solve for one, the opposing force usually catches up to them. So questions that solve for one thing are usually trick questions. I've refined my question to be "How can I be more authentic and become who the world needs me to be?"
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