I thought about writing a year in review after we got the always amusing newsletter from one of our college friends. The standard newsletter type stuff came to my mind when I first started entertaining the idea. Beach trips, all kinds of baseball games, a trip to Philadelphia, a wedding. But then I started thinking about the kinds of things that happened this year that you don't capture with a picture. Changes in relationships, insights into the whys and ways of my life, little backstage peeks of the production that is my life. New ways of seeing the world, recognizing why people do what they do, what matters to them, what makes them who they are. I don't know if anybody would want read a newsletter like that. That might be an even better reason to write it.
Before getting the annual holiday update, I thought about recapping my year in other ways. There's the metric focused approach. The number of books read, 40 something at the last count, miles run, miles lost to injury. Meters rowed, pounds lost (and gained). Looking at where I spent my time (classes, reading, writing stories for an anniversary gift (and copying those stories into a notebook)). Boring, boring, boring. That's a good way of looking at what I did, but there is nothing in that approach that gets at WHY I did those things. Or why I failed to do other things. What about the way all these things are related to one another and all the other parts of my life? Simply recounting what I did doesn't get at that. Did I make progress towards something? Am I any closer to the life that I really want or am I just marking time in the life that has sprung up around me?
I finish my MBA this week. Well, it's pretty much finished now but I don't consider myself finished until the last set of questions are posted in the final forum. Then I'll be done. It's an interesting experience finishing this degree. It's just the kind of thing you would put in your holiday newsletter. It's a notable accomplishment to include in some self-congratulatory list compiled to reassure me that I'm doing something worthwhile. Even as I finish the degree and people at work congratulate me and not what a great accomplishment it is, I'm left wondering if it was worth the time and effort. I always told myself that I did the work at night so it didn't really interfere with family time. But all that working at night kept me up late. My energy and focus was spent on papers and exams when it could have been spent on my relationships. My wife teases me about the subject of my next degree. She's wondering what will be more important to me than her next. What will be the next subject that I study to distract myself from the reality of my life. Classes, papers, discussions are ways to avoid dealing with the real world.
All the stuff that I would include in some kind of annual recap would just be a list of some of the ways that I shunted energy away from what really mattered into things that keep me from fully experiencing life. Focusing on my goals is an easy way to avoid dealing with the things in my immediate life that make me uncomfortable. Is it more important to read some arbitrary number of books or to recognize when my son needs me to listen to him and understand why he struggles? Is it better to have all of my patience and energy shunted into a meaningless paper about China or to be fully present and engaged when my wife tells me about a problem she's having at work?
The pursuit of some arbitrary goal selected because it makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something is more likely to be keeping me from really achieving something else. What would happen if I went all in on my career for one year? What if I really focused on my physical health and relationships? Would I accomplish more than a list of random and kind of hollow accomplishments that aren't really about making something happen?
There's really only one way to find out...
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