It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but it could be different. It’s an interesting thing when we think about how much time there is for growth and progression in a year – as we age older and older, and each passing Christmas becomes that little less special each time it happens and gradually more and more a ritual to add to the ever growing list of ‘things to to’, and if we’re not careful, every day can become another set of actions which we mechanically perform without any direction or any wholly meaning purpose or meaning behind it.
We often think to ourselves that a year a large amount of time. That many things can be performed and achieved within the span of a year. And indeed, a lot of times, many things are achieved and areperformed – except whether or not these things really do help you become the person who you want to be, and help you gain that sense of fulfillment, freedom, happiness, joy, and the qualities that are inherent in the life that you want to live is often a question. Too often, the things that we do are the urgent, but unimportant things in our lives – the essay on circus-training in Alabama that is worth only 2.5% of your final grade, that project that your coworkers delegated to you which is due in two days, the stack of paperwork left on your desk – the things that have deadlines but really just aren’t that important.
All too often, I’ve found that many people end up filling up their lives with the endless barrage of unimportant, unfulfilling, but nevertheless urgent tasks. An individual day is lived performing a multitude of these urgent tasks, and then we eat, sleep, then wake up the next day and repeat the same kinds of tasks that we’ve done yesterday, the last week, the last month, and before long, it’s not difficult to imagine that our entire year has been filled up with unimportant yet urgent tasks. For what is a year but a day followed by another again and again and again?
I think that if we follow this kind of programming where we just do the things that are urgent, it can be easy to a) miss out on the things that are extremely important but not urgent, and b) end up looking back at our years wondering ‘what the hell have I really done?’. Following the string of unimportant, urgent tasks that are laid out before us in our daily lives and hoping to achieve happiness and the life of our dreams is like opening up Wikipedia and clicking on the first link that you see, then clicking the first link that you see on the new page, and again for each subsequent page in the hopes of landing on the article specifically about Pope John Paul’s perchance for paronomasia (no, that doesn’t actually exist, unfortunately). The kind of life filled with mundane and banal tasks can lead us to a situation where we look back to who we were exactly one year ago, and compare it to who we are now.
It’s interesting because if I take a journey back exactly one year ago, thinking about where I am in life, my sense of fulfillment, self-esteem, social competency and so on, I can admit that I’m not a lot different. And that scares me. I’m still often socially insecure, struggling with self-esteem issues, overly intellectual, and so on, and I’ve realized that without a conscious decision to change, and the discipline day in and day out to perform the actions, and realize the beliefs that will bring you to where you want to be, one can easily become static in the fog of banalities and tasks which are enforced upon us on a daily basis.
Unless we are, as individuals, content with simply ‘going along with the flow’ and letting our lives be defined by the unimportant yet urgent tasks in our lives, we run the very real risk of never giving proper attention to the important but not urgent things that we could be doing in order to really live the way that we want to be. What kinds of things am I talking about? The kinds of actions whose greatest benefits only come through a cumulative investment of effort into the particular task. Something like exercising often has an immediate as well as a long-term benefit, but consider something such as starting a self-reflective journal and unfailing updating it with ways in which you could have acted better in your life. Doing something as lacking in urgency as journaling your thoughts for a month may not give you any notable immediate relief, yet it’s the kind of activity which can change your course by that .1 of a degree that adds up so much over the long-run. Think of two planes which start off with an angle difference of a single degree, and let them fly apart for twenty years. The difference between them, although initially small, will be massive at the end of their journeys. I think that’s the kind of difference which comes from doing these important and non-urgent tasks day in and day out, and I think that’s a step in the right direction if we want to ensure that we live lives more of our own volition and choosing, rather than living lives which are dominated by unimportant and urgent tasks, which can ultimately leave us simply older, but not really that much different, versions of ourselves at the end of another year.
