A New Year & Decade Dawns.
Most of us find that some dates more important than others. We celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, New Year’s, and new decades with varying degrees of excitement or dread, resolutions to improve, or resign ourselves to whatever circumstances life and chance have assigned to us.
Behind all of these emotions lay two unalterable facts: one is that our only finite resource is time, and the second that we have no idea what amount we still have in our account.
Therein lies the internal balancing act which we all must either accept or deny, and whichever we elect will determine how we proceed with our lives.
When I was a smoker, which I was for some 35 years, I used to think, “Well, if I know for sure that I’ll live for another 5 years then I would quit.” This obviously reinforced my desire to avoid the short term misery of quitting since no such guarantee was forthcoming. This continued smoking was also reinforced by multiple doctors who had told me, beginning in my middle 20s, that I would be dead within 5 years.
Half a century later I am still around, the physicians aren’t, and, happily, some twenty years ago I decide the short term benefits of foregoing my daily pack and a half offset my need for guarantees.
This brief exercise in self-revelation is meant to serve only one purpose – to suggest to you that you too might find some motivation to make whatever changes you envision for yourself without any guarantees – none being available in any case.
I would also suggest, as this traditional time of resolutions looms, that you think about what changes you might wish to have in place, not on January 1, but on September 1.
It can help us make changes if we have a defined an attractive goal. With that in mind, we can construct a way to achieve that goal.
But with only negative goals – I won’t smoke, drink, spend, eat – we sabotage ourselves. A “goal” of not smoking, for example, simply creates a hole in our daily routines and that hole becomes a vacuum that sucks us right back to another cigarette, bottle of chardonnay or vodka, or other behavior we thought we were giving up.
You, our readers, are smart, accomplished, creative and self-aware individuals. No cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all conformity will apply to you nor help you. These “everyone knows” solutions will only demean and frustrate you, as the doctors did me, and send you back to the comforting – if no longer satisfactory – “solution” that comes packaged in the glass container of your choice.
Would you like a little assistance in mapping out the route from now until “then?” Your own personal and individual exploration of you own preferences and possibilities?”
We’re available to work with you on that personal cartography project that will allow you to leave the current “security of familiar miseries” behind and discover what you have been missing but might yet attain.
One call, one consultation, one thing that may, at your discretion, lead to another.
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