I have friends that head south during gray cloudy Midwest winters, but I find something restful about these monochromatic days of January. I hear no leaf blowers, there is no pollen upsetting my nose, and my hands finally heal from bug bites.
The lack of noise does give us all a chance to consider what is ahead in this new year, 2023. What would we like to do differently this year? Drink more water? Get up earlier? I have vowed to read more and be kinder each day (like everyone else), but on these quieter days of winter when the sun gets shy and hides, I wonder, what will I be most proud of when I’m sitting on the edge of 2024, looking back over this year?
It may not be my accomplishments.
In Bob Buford’s book, Halftime, he made the point that the second half of our lives is a time for more reflection and awareness and less about accomplishment. While our efforts to make things better in our world are not to be discounted, Buford stated that perhaps those things can happen more fluidly if we quit trying so hard to be significant by clawing our way to the top for a trophy. However, as I converse with a younger generation, I rarely hear New Year’s resolutions that include plans for deeper reflection or prayer. I do hear a lot about a “mindful” attitude of moving up the ladder of success.
Buford’s premise also closely follows the philosophy of another writer, Jack Canfield, best known for his Chicken Soup for the Soul series. Back before he became a household word, Canfield put out a series of cassette tapes that were meant to challenge prevailing motivational speeches. He said, in effect, that instead of setting goals and checking off our accomplishments, we should instead make our list of what we got done at the end of the day and then check off every item.
What’s that you say? You mean we make the list after we do everything we need to do?
At first this sounds like a ridiculous notion. Checking off everything you did after you did it would leave you accomplishing one hundred percent of everything you did, every day. If you are thinking that kind of list would leave you with a perfect success rate, then you would be absolutely right!
This is how that would look. Each day you would rise and begin living your life as it comes along, writing down things like, 1) Made coffee and read the newspaper, 2) yelled at the kids to get out of bed, 3) cleaned up the oatmeal that exploded in the microwave, and so on as the day progressed. By suppertime, you’d be looking at your list of things that you finished, and then simply check off every single one of them!
Now, imagine doing this for a whole year. Day after day, without fanfare or pressure, you would begin your day with no list, and at the end of the day you’d check each item off as “DONE” with the result being a successful year of completing everything you did. Of course, this is very similar to the adage: What would you do if you knew you could not fail?
My Canfield tapes are long gone, but I do remember how liberating his point could be compared to my own perfectionism. As I am reminded of advice from both Buford and Canfield, it seems I can look forward to a new year knowing that my resolutions are already checked off the list. You have to admit, that kind of freedom does give an energy boost to lofty goals and opens up the possibility of something even better than stressing over what we did not get done, for example achieving peace of mind.
Whoa, there horsey. Already I’m feeling withdrawal symptoms from my 3 X 5 cards. Where is that old familiar feeling of being overwhelmed going to fit in? How can I ever become the over-achiever I long to become?
Consider this absurd illustration, also by Canfield, of a couple witnessing their child’s first monumental attempts to walk. Let’s call their child Chuckie. As the parents oooh and ahhhh over these first steps, and watch Chuckie stumbles and falls, they suddenly are heard to say, “Oh, would you look at that? How sad. Little Chuckie just tried to get up on his feet and take a step. Oh, my! There he goes again. Oh! Fell right over. That’s too bad. Poor Chuckie… he’s probably not going to ever walk.”
Any parent who has raised a child knows how silly that sounds. To observe a child’s repeated falls as an indication they will never walk is almost too cruel to think about. We assume as parents that, through trial and error, our little precious Chuckies will eventually be able to take their first step, then another and another – all we need to do is nudge them along with love!
The idea of what our new year could be and how it could be different, perhaps needs this kind of shaking up, a paradigm shift.
One rainy day last week I was walking laps in the gym and eyeing an aggressive basketball game on the inside court. I observed ten very large men racing back and forth, out for blood, intensely pivoting, shoving elbows, and using every fowl word in the English language. As their intensity grew their play got more physical, until finally, the club manager had to be called out to put the ball players in a time-out. The remainder of us in the gym, going about our workout, were quietly thinking one thought:
“Give it a rest, guys! It’s just a basketball game!”
I’m certainly not trying to say that the ball players should have taken periodic breaks to involve themselves in some new-age rock worshipping or transcendental meditation. Disregarding a premature March madness, what was the end goal here for these men? They began playing ball with anticipation and fun but were shortly drawn into a display of very BAD sportsmanship and lack of maturity. Whatever they had hoped to achieve in their yelling and threats to each other was hampered, then spoiled by some imaginary trophy on the other side of Saturday morning hoops with the boys.
Perhaps a better goal for these men was not to have a goal at all.
What are we going for here, sports fans, in 2023? A banquet with a speech? Recognition? Are we going for the trophy as we spend another year flying up and down the basketball court?
I think both Buford and Canfield were offering something different and that is this: It’s a new year. Start at the beginning. Try the art of walking, and practice your walk until you can make it from one end of the court to the other without starting WW III. You’ll be sure to have a good year, a good 2023.
This seems very doable to me. In fact, I’ve checked it off my list already.