‘You live and you learn, but by the time you have learnt, it’s too late to live.’ G.B.Shaw, I think.
How do you learn about life and about yourself? How do you know if you are living a good life? How do you know if you are achieving those tiny or big goals you keep for yourself?
It’s by measuring and documenting .
One cannot depend on the mind, for our mind, and the memories it keeps, is fickle.
I make a goal of running a mile in three months. I start with a run-walk program three days a week. The first week, it goes great. I walk around with the glow of starting a new activity. I whisper to myself -I am a runner. I feel good. My body feels light. I feel everyone knows that I am a runner.
The next week due to some silly reason, maybe it’s raining or it’s too hot, or I had a late night, I am able to do only one or two sessions. Each session is a drag. By the end of one, my knees are hurting. During another, I can barely catch my breath.
The third week I miss the run-walks altogether. I just do my 2 mile walk, I cannot push my heavy body to run, I feel defeated. I can’t even run a few steps leave alone a mile. And then I forget that this was my goal.
A few weeks pass. I come across my list of goals while trying to organize my junk folder-it’s a folder with all the bits and pieces of paper, articles, pictures, cut out from magazines that I aim to read one day. I realize that running a mile by the end of this year is a goal of mine and I should get cracking at it. I ‘remember’ that I could run pretty well when I tried it a few months ago.
The process repeats itself. Another month goes by and I am back to square one.
I have realized that one of the reasons why I don’t achieve my goals is that I forget.
If I don’t write it somewhere, I forget that I wanted to run a mile, or learn a language. I forget that I wanted to read a particular book or grow a particular flower. I forget I am interested in a certain philosophy, or culture, and should focus on reading about it.
The other reason is that it seems so ‘big’. As in who am I to think I can run a mile? Or learn a language? Or paint? I don’t have the talent for it. Surely it’s more difficult to be in the fifties and learn something new.
There is a lot of talk in the blogosphere and the podcastosphere? about developing habits to achieve goals. The premise is that instead of focussing on the goal, break it into small achievable steps, which are easy to do, and if you do them sufficiently regularly and consistently, it will be easier to complete your list of yearly goals.
I used to do this a lot. I would keep a daily and weekly and monthly log on a piece of 8×10 paper, usually on the back of the flyers my daughters got from school-got to save the trees-and I would write in all the steps to be taken on a regular basis to achieve the final result.
I was more regular with this when the children were younger. I think subconsciously, I was trying to set a good example for them.
Well, I succeeded. Both of them keep copious lists about their daily and weekly activities to do.
In the last few years I have fallen out of the habit of keeping a to-do list. So each time I start an activity, I forget, and drop it by the wayside, and remember it a few months later, and then by the end of the year have nothing to show for it.
For example, this year the goal was to learn how to make a baby sweater. I am learning from my mother, and I see her almost everyday, still I ‘forget’ about this activity.
Then I will see a baby, or read about someone else show off their crocheted creation, and try and find my unfinished piece from whichever corner I have thrown it into.
I have started this month to try and be more creative. And I am trying to write about it here as and when I finish an activity.
This was a very on the spur of the moment decision, no thinking through the process.
I like what I am doing. I would like to fine-tune this process and add some more structure to it.
Right now, I am just doing, and that itself feels great! Each day I think about how I can be more creative. And I did write a post on the few activities I wanted to complete this month.
Being creative is not a time-limited activity. It’s something which takes time to come to fruition.
I have a whole month to achieve it, and this blog to keep me accountable. Let’s see what turns up.
I finished this today, just look at the colors!