New Year’s Retirements

I wish I could remember the article I read that spawned this. It deserves the credit.  I’m expanding in someone else’s good idea.

            By now you’ve forgotten your resolutions, or stuck with them as best you can, or passed on having any at all.  Good for you on all accounts.  There is no one single way to live a life and any one of these strategies may work for you.  I found another.

            Resolutions are changes we want to make to improve.  It’s a good idea but they rarely stick. A different change we can make at the beginning of a new year is one that simply makes us feel better about where we are in our lives, and you don’t have to do jack.

Instead of resolving to change something in your life for the better, we can abandon expectations, pressures, or daydreams that weigh us down.  It wasn’t mentioned in the original article, but I think an age range is in order.  If you are healthy and under thirty, just let it all ride. Dream on, keep trying. In your thirties, you can begin to recognize what might be possible in your life and the steps and time it will take to get it done.  By your late thirties, provided you have completed a decent amount of self-reflection and analysis, you’ll know what you will and won’t do.

            Then it’s time to shed some stuff.

            Give up becoming a millionaire by 40 or give it up at all.  When you get to your fifties, are you really going to learn a language, travel to Tibet, learn the piano from scratch, run that marathon, open up a cupcake shop?  Really?  You’ll know the answer.  If you’re not, drop it.  Delete from the bucket list. I’m not sure how we got to this area in our culture (yes, this is very American) that we have to do all, be all, see all, and be our perfect selves while perfection itself is an affront to nature?  If you retire these thoughts, you’re not giving up.  If you never started down the path, how can you give up?  You are lightening the self-inflicted burden on your shoulders.  You made the dream, so you can also cancel it like an HBOMax subscription.

            We are here for a time.  We do the best with what we have.  Then we are gone.  We aren’t characters in a story.  We are imperfect beings. It’s okay.

            As for me:

            I will no longer try to learn to play guitar.  I got a guitar as a gift over 30 years ago and I treasure it.  In the 90’s I learned to play a handful of chords and a few licks.  That’s it.  I still have my drums and I plan to get some real lessons to move forward.  So, the drums are alive for me.  But the guitar fades away.

            I will let my teacher brain dissipate into the ether.  What is a teacher brain?  I was only a teacher for a year and a half, so it’s nothing I developed there.  I’m kind of a smarty-farty when it comes to a lot of things and I at least have the urge to ‘mansplain’ or ‘dadsplain’ all of the time.  It happens 95% inside my skull, so thankfully I’m not that much of a bore or a shithead to others.  But I have thousands of mental hours logged preparing for speeches and lessons to people who never asked for them.  I’m giving myself permission to let all that shit go.   It’s a retirement of a responsibility that I never actually had.

            In that same vein, I will no longer search for the silver bullet to change the world for the better.  That’s ego.  But it is in the back of my mind.  I have a creative brain, but that’s the limit. 

            You do what you can, where you can. 

            My wife and I are homebodies and we’re not well traveled.  I won’t beat myself up for that anymore.  We just aren’t as interested in it as we used to be.  Any future trips will have their own meaning to us and we’ll be patient when we pick the next place. I have no interest in impressing other people with my passport. I’m retiring the notion of becoming a world traveler.

            I retired the idea of becoming a best-selling author a while ago. I still have my mind set on becoming a published author and have plans in motion.  So that one’s still floating around because I’m on the path.  I don’t care about being recognized or going on the Stephen Colbert show.  It’s fantasy, not anything else. 

            The feeling is like removing a heavy coat. You can do it today, it you like.

            What do you got?