Yeah, I was gonna do a big ol’ fat wrap-up of last year, and a big ol’ fat wad of my “goals” for the New Year, but it turns out that at my age it’s all going past so fast that I didn’t have time to do much last year other than idly sharpening my amused detachment from most of the weirdness in the world.
And somehow, although I haven’t done anything, I managed to run out of time before I could post an end-of-year entry. I’m oddly reminded of the interview someone did with a woman back in the gray days of the Soviet Union. “In the Soviet Union,” she said, “we have a nationwide crisis of not getting enough to eat and obesity.” Yeah, replace the eat/food references with “Time Management” buzzwords and there’s my life in a nutshell.
Also, I don’t remember what my actual goals were which I could probably also blame on age but is more likely related to laziness, a chronic condition/feature throughout much of my life that I’ve discovered I’m too lazy to fix.
So, I gotta just be generally satisfied with the fact that it was a pretty good year.
The Beneficiary and I are reasonably healthy, usually more-or-less happy, and mostly getting along. The job’s going pretty well, and the extended family’s reasonably good; in fact “Reasonably Good” seems to be an accurate summary of the year, which means it’s head and shoulders above many of my years up to this point. I’ll take “Reasonably Good”, thanks, and if “Reasonably Good” continues past the artificial time borderline of a New Year for some extended period, I could deal with that, too.
I suspect that any goals set for this year would disappear into the same black hole as last year’s without so much as a drowning bubble breaking the surface, so I’m gonna give those a miss. I’m just going to try to be happy with, or at least accepting of, whatever the days bring along, since virtually all of it is out of my control and going to happen regardless of my opinion or feelings about it.
This, incidentally, is base-line Stoic philosophy — I can control my actions and my reactions, but not much else in the world. Everything outside of myself is going to continue happening, and my only input is to be unhappy about it or at least accepting or (ideally) happy about it. My perception of and internal response to the chaos is the only part I 100% control, and the chaos will continue without a whit of notice or care which way I go.
I’m a long ways from perfecting that approach, but I’m a helluva lot better at it than I used to be. Getting even better at it could count as a goal. The problem is that it’s not the kind of goal that can be measured very well, like “lose 15 pounds” or “cut YouTube time down to eight or ten hours a day”. The only yardstick is subjective: “Is it making my life better?”
So far the answer is “yes” so I guess my goal for the year is to keep getting a “yes” to the question.
"Quod Obstat Viae Fit Via" (What Obstructs The Way Becomes The Way) is up in the tag-line of this blog and is the root of what I need to do every day this year. It means:
Focus on the things I can control and let go of everything else; turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, and tougher. This involves three interdependent, interconnected, and fluidly contingent disciplines: my Perception, my Action, and my Will. These are literally the only things I can control about anything, and I must master them.
Tah-Dah! My 2022 goal thankewveddymuch.
Oh, the title of this entry? R-365 means “Retired Minus 365”. In other words, I have 365 days until I’m 100% retired. Assuming I live long enough to get there (“Memento Mori*” as the stoics would say), I’m kind curious how it’s all gonna go. Prolly write that Great American Novel thinger I’ve been putting off.
Footnote:
*”Memento Mori” means “Remember Death”, or, in a more expanded version “You could leave life right now. Let that govern what you do or say.” It doesn’t mean “Live Like You Want, You’re Gonna Die Anyhow” — it means “If You Died This Second, Would You Have Been Doing Something Worthwhile?”↩
It's like a koan, maybe. Remember death, remember you will die, the ego dies, everyone dies, in a hundred years, all new people. Don't get cocky. I had read the phrase was said to victorious returning Roman generals by their attending slaves--which I took to mean, you're a hero now, but remember you, too, will die some day. Perspective.
ReplyDeleteActually, I take a large lesson from the Greek and Roman statues they keep digging up. Some are just art pieces, but a large number are luminaries important enough to have been memorialized in public spaces with full-sized or larger hand-carved marble tributes so that they'd be remembered forever. The marble remains, but even high-geek-level historians can't tell you who most of them are. Just another passing fart in a tornado, as an old Lieutenant of mine used to say, as are we all.
DeleteProfound idea, that. I don't even know what my own grandfather did in his life, for the most part, and I know exactly nothing about his father. In fact Henry Louis Gates Jr. remarked once that most peoples' knowledge of their own family history rarely extends to their great-grandparents.
ReplyDeleteI'll bet "just another passing fart in a tornado" sounds pretty impressive in Latin, though.