The trouble with goals is that the tend to look only to the future.
It’s the time of year when the media is filled with what you should be planning for the year ahead. I am, as a productivity junkie (lapsed), noddlingly consuming this fodder. But I have a degree of scepticism about the achievability of these lists of things recommended by hacks around the world. Most of it’s clickbait, designed to grab our overfed attention as we slide into the end of a year in which we generally failed to achieve this past year’s January recommendations. Chances are, we’ll reach next December weighing about the same, drinking and eating about the same, having wasted that gym membership, etcetera, etcetera.
It’s an awful cycle of guilt and recrimination.
This coming year is an important milestone for me: I am entering the last year of a decade, and the final year of a half century. Exiting this coming calendar year, I will roll into my second half century (assuming I’m spared). So I am paying particular mind to my use of time, with increased awareness of its scarcity. But also I am increasingly conscious of the time I have already spent.
In reflecting about the past, it occurred to me today that the turn of the year is typically more about focus on the future than focus on the past, despite the oft-sung lyrics of Auld Lang Syne at this time of year. We, most of us, don’t know the lyrics, nor their intent and meaning and, if we do, we pay them scant mind. And yet, despite this, it’s mumbled out each and every year in most English-speaking nations. Mr Burns intended it as a reminder to remember our old friends and the role they have played in our life and yet, to read what we are generally recommended to focus on (here’s a typical example), that’s not one of them.
But, as I reflect on my past 49 years, I have a mind to do exactly that.
It may seem a little regressive, but I am of the view that every influence on my life in that time that can be embodied in human form probably has some small part in both shaping the person I am today and in the statistical likelihood of my achieving my goals in 2018.
Looking to the past, whilst no predictor of the future, is a helpful perspective on where I have come from and where I am going to. So in setting my goals this year, one of them will be to spend some time appreciating my past.