“As I welcome Winter, I take all the opportunities I can, to rest and reflect on the seasons past.”
It’s an age thing, but I am genuinely freaked by how quickly time is escaping. I remember how I used to joke about Clive saying "a year or two back", when he meant ten or so. I get it now. Time really does speed up. There are all sorts of reasons for that perception. I think it’s mainly to do with how much a given period of time is as a proportion of your lived-time-to-date. When you’re six years old, a year amounts to 16% of your lived experience. That’s quite a big chunk. When you’re sixty, it’s only 1.6%, not so noticeable, maybe.
Perhaps, therefore, it is all the more important that we take time out to reflect on the year that just sped past…to acknowledge what we did with it.
Did we do what we intended? Did we learn anything? What surprised or delighted us? What have we survived, what are we still challenged by?
I know, without even looking, that my journals for this last year include references to ‘drifting’, to being ‘uninspired’. They include lots of moans about what I’m not doing, or not doing enough of.
On the other hand, I did have to go and look, to see the entries about what happened that was good, that was aligned with my intentions, that was serendipitous loveliness…I knew those entries were in there too, but it’s harder to hold them front of mind. That is sad, the way even we optimists get caught up in the negatives.
It matters therefore that we make space for reflecting on what was good in the year, much more so than what wasn’t. You’ll remember the manure so try to remember the flowers as well.
If this sounds too much like your workplace “annual appraisal” forgive me. I was the weird one in the office who actually enjoyed her appraisals. I always looked on them as an opportunity to be honest about why I hadn’t done what maybe I was supposed to (hey, me human too!) but more importantly a chance to say, "Yeah, but look at this! This is what I did, that I also want credit for!" Sometimes we don’t do what we set out to do (or what they told us we should do) but what we do instead can often be even more important. In life as well as in work.
So, now that I have no boss, when I do my own personal annual appraisal, I’m even more focussed on what I did do. In any year there will be things to acknowledge that did not go the way I wanted them to – that may do so with an adjustment of course, or that may simply never be the way I want them to be. Recognising which it is, sets me up for dealing with my next year: change course, or let it go. It doesn’t mean either of those things will be either simple or easy, but at least I know where to put the energy…stop flogging dead horses, basically.
Defining success
At the beginning of the year, I set out five commitments. Yes, I know that’s a bit geeky too, but when one of your best buddies is a coach and another is a teacher, it’s an unavoidable mindset. And for me, it works. It gives me that yardstick to gauge whether I’m doing what I said I wanted to do, and if not, why not?
“Because I don’t really want to” is a valid answer to that last question.
It is an amazing insight to recognise that you’re trying really hard to do something you don’t want to do. That’s a waste. One of the most important quotes on my vision board is the one that says, “You can always change your mind.”
So, when my answer comes back that the reason I'm struggling to do something I set out to do is that it feels too much like a chore, or nah, just can’t be bothered…I recognise the depth of that.
It’s fine. This is my soul is telling me that something is not worth the cost. I’m very lucky to be at a stage of my life where I can then just ditch it…but wherever you are in your life, listen to that message. It might be that it is not something you can just walk away from right now, but hear the calling to go do something else, and spend some time figuring out how you might do that. It will be worth it.
What exactly my commitments for the year were and precisely how well I did against them is interesting only to me – and even to me what is more interesting is that in the areas I thought I was doing OK, it was actually more than ok – and in the areas I thought I was doing a bit rubbish, I wasn’t…I was just taking a completely different approach. In some places I had shifted course, without really thinking about it, and it turned out it was working. In others, I'd abandoned things entirely.
This is the point where I put my hands up and say “Yep. You and me both. Targets are bullshit. They are counterproductive.”
It's taken me a while to fully appreciate the importance of the difference between a target (or a goal) and a commitment. Targets and goals are outcomes. We can never control the outcome. There are always too many other variables. What we can control is the input. That’s the commitment part of the equation…what we commit to doing, the steps we commit to taking. On the back of that, my really big insight for this year is that I am more likely to take those steps, if I don’t compromise the commitment by hampering it with a deadline or a target.
I am still a bit of spreadsheet geek, so I haven’t given up my step-by-step logging of stuff, but they have become simple records. I have removed all the future dates from them. I decided that so long as I was headed in the direction I want to go, then it doesn’t matter how slowly. That was surprisingly revolutionary. That simple step removed all the demoralising and demotivating aspects of recording my progress. Now I only open the log-sheet to record successes, and each success is a spur to the next step. No more demotivating scrutinising of where I thought I ought to be by this point, just yippity-do-dah I’m another step along the road.
I even get to forget about the side-steps and back-slides. They don’t count. All that counts is the forward steps. Some of them come rapidly…some of them are really, painfully, pitifully, slow. Does not matter. What matters is that I take them, and notice them and acknowledge each one as the success that it is.
How we define “success” is also important. I jump up and down and tell everyone I know, when I get something published or am shortlisted or win a prize. I also hold dear when something I’ve written has clearly touched someone else on a personal level. I collect these moments, for when I need to be reminded that I can do this.
However, just putting the time in, getting the words down, sending the words out…they also count on my success chart. I don’t obsessively keep count of that, but towards the end of the year, doing a quick and dirty reckoning shows me how much I have done…and when that is a lot more than I thought I had…well that’s another little happy dance in my back room. I am doing the work, and that’s all I can do.
I love Julia Cameron’s prayer (in The Artist’s Way) “Great Creator, I will take care of the quantity, you take care of the quality.” I figure that if I do enough work, the odds are that some of it will land the way I want it to. I freely admit that my dross pile is way, way, way, bigger than my ‘someone said this is good’ pile, but that’s precisely why I am being less reticent about sharing my successes. And it is precisely why you should too. So much of what we produce isn’t that good – and we will beat ourselves up for it – so to big ourselves up when we get it right, is no more than restoring the balance.
So how was it for me, this year that's nearly done?
Naturally, not everything worked well.
In one area my practice has lapsed, and recovered, and lapsed again. My teacher has other priorities, and I miss the regularity of tuition, but that is an excuse, not a reason. I have enough resources to hand to be able to practice every day, to keep inching forward, and I have allowed other things to get in the way. The salve to my soul is that I do keep coming back to it. Random conversations with other people bring me back to how much I really do want this. They are all reminders that, if that is true, then I need to do the work, and do it more consistently than I have this year. The salve to my mental-me is that it will not go away. It will still be there when I am ready to focus more strongly.
Another project fell at the first hurdle. People got in the way of what I intended to do. The weather got in the way of what I intended to do. Railway engineering works got in the way of what I intended to do. Somewhere along the line, I think I just gave up. It is still on the books; it has just slipped down the agenda somewhat. It too will come around again.
One of my plans got abandoned so early in the year that I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I know that I have found another route to where that one was meant to lead me…so that’s ok too.
In other areas, though, things happened that I did not expect to. Shortlistings and publications. Moving writing projects much further on than I thought was likely.
So often this year, I have felt that I am not writing, not focussed...whatever I might mean by that...the numbers suggest otherwise: the number of pieces written or reworked, the number of pieces sent out, the number of times individuals fed back on a very human level, person-to-person.
Who knows, maybe the dross-to-decent ratio is a universal constant? The more we create, the more of it will be good-enough. Or maybe it's not about whether any of it is good-enough, maybe it is just about it finding the right landing site? Same rule applies, the more I release into the wild, the greater the chance it will find its way home.
And let's not forget the rest of our life
In this reflective endeavour, let's also take time to reflect on the whole encompassing of our life this year. Unlike the workplace appraisal, this isn't all about achievement. It’s not all about personal development and growth. It’s also about comfort. It’s about fun. It’s about playing, travelling, reading, dancing, swimming, sharing food, talking, loving, being loved, watching movies, looking at stars, listening to waves, or birds, or rock music. It’s about gardening and painting and crafting. It’s about long baths, cold showers, candles, wine, cake, fresh fruit straight from the tree. It’s about children and old folk. It's about paying the bills, making a home. It’s about tears and laughter. It’s about learning things you’ll never need to know. It’s about doing – and noticing - all the things in your life that serve no purpose other than to fill you with the sense that you are alive.
I had a lot of all of that this year. I went back to places I love. I went for the first time to places I will go back to – and to places I probably won’t. I made new friends. And spent time with old ones. I ate in lovely restaurants, and picnicked on beaches and in woods. There was a lot of laughter and a lot of music. And enough silence as well. There were full moons and dark skies of stars. Sunsets. Storms. Flowers, trees, fungi. Rivers and seas. There were strangers and unexpected conversations. There were frustrations and the people who rescued me from them. There were the times everything went so much better than I thought it would, beautiful apartments, transport doing what it said it would do, helpful hosts. There were stories and poems.
We’re heading towards the turning of the year, however you measure that, whichever day you take as your pivot point…so before you get there, I invite you to find a quiet space to reflect on where you were a year ago, where you wanted to be today, and where you actually are right now.
There are so many small things that make up a year. A year may be a huge chunk of your life-to-date or an increasingly small portion, but it is still a year – and I think it is worth an hour or two to remember what was so utterly wonderful about this one. You will automatically remember what wasn’t…so it matters to take the time to remember what was.
Give yourself the gift of cherishing the small, beautiful moments of the year. Give yourself the gift of crediting your achievements…inputs as well as outcomes. Maybe the year will turn out to have been a better one than you thought.
~ ~ ~
The opening quote is from a Weekly Affirmation Calendar gifted by the now sadly defunct “Spirit & Destiny” magazine.
