PhotoCredit: Pandaemonium
Jenga feels so much like real life. Just as you have diligently organized your ambitions and projects, pieces of your carefully constructed stack are moved out from under you. Inevitably, it all falls down. Work gets in the way; people get in the way; Omicron gets in the way; changing seasons get in the way; and - let's face it - we get in our own way.
Our ambitions, goals and objectives become remote as the obstacles to overcome them loom large.
We started this year talking about getting clear about what we want for ourselves. Our I AM statements were a declaration of who we want to be in the world. We then assessed our actions - what do I need to do more of (or less of) to be that person? Then we dove into productivity for most of February, establishing an operating rhythm for our areas of focus.
Armed with clarity of vision and efficiency, surely nothing could touch us. Yet, inevitably comes the creep. Workload, life-load and overload take hold and we realize we are not the person we stated we wanted to be. Ambition-Reality dissonance is what we are going to call this. I have read countless books that seek to solve this problem via willpower, small changes, focus, relentlessness, loving oneself and not-giving-a-F__K. They are all entertaining reads. They are also all not very helpful.
The best advice I heard/read lately is that we need to turn the dial from denial to adventure. We tend to approach the broader realm of improvement through deprivation and discipline. What we can't have. What we must do. We take all the damn fun out of life. No wonder that on a bad day we disappear ourselves into a bag of potato chips and a bottle of wine.
Life is not an exercise in self-flagellation. What's the point of ambition if every step of your journey is like walking on broken glass. Ok, I am being a little dramatic.
The trick, the secret, is to make it fun. Make it enjoyable. Do email for an hour in the morning at a cafe; do your reading in the bath; put epic music on as you clean out your inbox (you can pause it when you have to think); color coordinate your calendar; play jargon bingo on conference calls; use colored pens instead of black and blue (who made up that stupid rule anyway?)
There will be some hard moments and mountains to climb along the way. Just don't make the day-to-day a relentless hard moment. Don't make following your dreams an impossible mountain. The more you find ways to enjoy life, the more energy you will have to spare when you really need it.