Moving forward

Seems sort of apropos that the last post (nine months ago!) was about making choices and discovering not only what suits us, but what doesn't.


I spent most of this past year exploring that latter bit. I now know LOTS of things that don't fit my visioned path, because I spent a good chunk of my time doing them. Not intentionally. Or at least, not with my highest and best intentions!

Drifting into life "at the last minute." We do this a lot. Or at least I do this a lot, and I doubt that I'm the only one. Life at the last minute is life in what Stephen Covey calls "urgent" (some important, others not, so I'm not going to assign it a specific quadrant).In other words, we're doing things when they HAVE to get done: bills paid "at the last minute." Gift shopping or holiday prepping "at the last minute." Walking at the door at the last minute that gets us to work within five minutes of being on time, not taking the car to the shop until we can't ignore that noise or us to the hospital because that pesky cough won't go away.

It's life according to deadline, which is something I'm very good at. It comes in handy sometimes, because it does mean you don't freeze at the thought of a deadline, but if you aren't careful, they sneak up on you because you're so busy dealing with the rest of the "last minute" that you don't put in the time you need to on the next thing.

This hurts when you're trying to, say, write a novel while you're doing edits for the last one. Or plan a new campaign for your business while you're struggling to figure the ROI in time for the board of directors meeting on the last campaign.

One of the things we'll explore over the coming weeks is how to move out of "last minute" living and into living in the present (the two are not the same), while creating the next "present" (aka planning for / creating the future).

Having spent a fair amount of time this year doing things that don't move me toward my goals had this effect: in the midst of grumbling to myself about it over the past few days, it narrowed down for me the focus of this blog: over the next several months, we'll be talking about things that center on conscious lifestyle choices (not just mine, but any interesting ones I come across, such as minimalism) and how we make choices that move us in the direction of our passions, of broadening our vision but narrowing our focus. We'll talk about hopes and fears and overcoming the challenges of both. I hope to do some interviews with people who found their passion, the later in life the better, and how they turned dreaming into living. Their conscious sanity.

Welcome back.