Astrid and I are navigating a lot of complexity together. We're doing well, moving through it, communicating our feelings and our needs to each other, and above all, trying to balance the here-and-now with the yet unknown future, or trying to manifest in the here-and-now the kinds of futures we desire for ourselves as individuals and for our lives together. To that end, beyond the verbal processing, the treating each other with extra attention and kindness, the connecting and reconnecting through talk and touch, we are engaged in a goal-setting exercise which we've been refining over the last week or so. We outlined our life values as individuals, listed our wishes. What does each of us want to manifest in our lives, the materialistic and the altruistic, the personal and the professional, the creative and the logistical? Today, we organized our wishes into goals, identified the areas of our lives the goals fit into, and assigned a timeline to each. Mine run the gamut from the microscopic-mundane:
Clear out the bookshelf in the dining room (personal goal). Timeline: immediate
to the long-ranging and grandiose:
Write and publish a nonfiction book (career goal). Timeline: 5 to 10 years.
I'm pleased to say I've already knocked out the bookshelf. It was a catch-all that caught everything from random shoelaces to no less than three bike U-lock mounts (never used) to a baseball mitt (last touched nearly three years ago) to my grad school readers and binders that had been collecting dust since graduation in 2008 to outdated telephone directories (why do they still make those things?) Now it's cleared out, dusted, virtually empty, waiting to be filled with objects that are more relevant to our lives now, useful and in use, a dynamic space rather than a dead one.
'Cause that's the point, really, to occupy the space of our lives with vitality and movement, rather than stagnancy, dust, the dead-end of inattention and the taking for granted that we just move from day to day without sight of our dreams, what we really want from this life: bookshelves of our own and bookshelves to share.
7 comments:
This post--particularly the last paragraph--was really inspiring to me. I've been feeling like I've become rather...well, stagnant. I'm trying to work on this.
Glad you got something from it! I think the trick, always, is to be kind with ourselves about the progress and the non-progress, alike. Movement sometimes feels microscopic. ((hugs!))
I've been inspired by you and Lynda Barry to identify 100 demons. I've only got 4 down so far, but its a fun project all the same. I hope your projects are fun too. Fun is important.
Hey Jacket, sorry it's taken me a while to get back to this comment. Thanks for the encouragement for fun. You're right: self-improvement projects should not be so overdetermined that they flatten ya. I'll check out your demons-in-progress. The very first idea that comes to me is shame. Shame keeps us from fully embodying ourselves, and god knows, if you can't inhabit your own skin, life's gonna be pretty dull.
You and Astrid could go into business as life coaches and offer this service in group workshops or, even better, private sessions. I'd sign up!
Michael - funny! We ripped off the priorities exercize from somebody else! Probably proprietary. :)
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