New Year here

New Year here

We are wrapping up 2018 by taking a long weekend at a farm house AirB&B way up near the New York and Pennsylvania border in the National forest. It is very cold and very quiet . . . outside at least. Inside it is more than noisy with 11 of us yelling and laughing and talking and catching up. I keep trying to find a quieter corner to just sit and soak up the positive sounds, and manage the negative sounds. Both are normal parts of living and living well. All we have is this moment, no matter if the calendar we use tells us that the current year is ending and new year about to begin. Those are somewhat artificial beginnings and endings after all.

So instead of making resolutions of those changes that I think may be necessary or beneficial for the coming year/future, this year I have been comtemplating the past year and grading myself on the things I did successfully and which ones I somewhat failed at and trying to discern why these were less than successful. Were the goals too ambitious? Did they lack appropriate urgency? Were they foolish and thus fail to grasp my attention and energy and focus on a daily or regular basis? What moved me forward? What was holding me back? Or you can make this process more emotionally and activity focused by doing the following.

Tim Ferris refers to this process as PYR's or previous year's review. He suggests that you take 30-60 minutes and do these steps:

1. Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.

2. Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week. 

3. For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns.

4. Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”

5. Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2019. These are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.

Experience

Experience

A wise person will never bet against my dad, when it comes to diagnosing the probable cause of a car's mechanical problem. Every single time I have done this in my life, I have lost. I am not a very wise man when it comes to car problems. Never will I forget 10 years ago, when both lights on my Jeep went out at the same time, I mean both! Everyone told me it HAD to be the dimmer switch in the steering column. Dad said likely both lights had just blown. But everyone (45 people) said it had to be the dimmer switch. So I changed out the dimmer switch - a six hour laborious, cuss-worthy, difficult and expensive job. When finished I had a new dimmer switched install but still no headlights. Yes, you know it, both headlamps had burned out at the same time. About 35 minutes of work and easy as pie, and cheap too.

This week my antique truck started to whistle. It wasn't whistling Dixie, but it was definitely whistling - in a loud and alarming manner. From within the cab of the truck while rolling down the road, it definitely sounded like the throw-out bearing was failing. We listened to it over and over and I would have bet $1000 that the whistle was coming from under my feet, definitely the throw-out bearing. But dad had his doubts, and we tested over and over. He would not let me yank that transmission and replace that bearing because it is a butt-ugly amount of work, and he had his doubts. He was fairly certain that it was the alternator. The alternator?? Finally after a week long stand-off I suggested we go ahead and change the alternator and eliminate that as a possible whistler, and then we could get on to the real work of changing the bearing, and the worst that could happen is that I had a new alternator in the old truck.

Yes, you know it, it was the alternator. 

It's a little spooky what 60 years of experience can teach you. Be wise. Listen to the guy with the experience. 

What you love will change and be gone soon enough

What you love will change and be gone soon enough

There are many nostalgic things surrounding me while visiting here with my dad. They don't exist any longer, they are firmly in the past and only memories. Almost none of the things that I fondly remember from my childhood are possible in the present, 50 years later. Wow, that's a big number!

This will be each person's personal experience, if they live long enough. It is inevitable. The only constant is change. So what does that mean for today? Well at the very least it means that the things I love today, will also be not longer available in the future. It is that kind of change - the irreversible type. I can come to love new and exciting things, like my grandchildren, but the people, values, challenges, problems, sicknesses, politics, population density, landscape, weather, as well as the possibilities are all different than when I was a boy, and no matter what your age is today, the changes you see it a typical lifespan will be enormous. 

That is a great opportunity or a horrible reality - it mostly depends on your mindset. You decide. Everyday.