Mon. Oct. 4, 2021: Questions for 2022

image courtesy of Misael Moreno via unsplash.com

It’s time to start pondering some goals, dreams, and resolutions for 2022.

Most of our goals and dreams were tossed in 2020, thanks to the pandemic, and the biggest resolution was to stay alive.

Most of this year’s hopes were crashed, thanks to selfish anti-vaxxers, who believe their right to walk around as murderous biological weapons is greater than anyone else’s right to survival.

Now, it’s time to take what we’ve learned from both those years and start reshaping our goals, dreams, and resolutions to make 2022 a better year both personally and collectively.

I’ve posted some questions I am pondering, and am sharing them in hopes it will help you. On January 1 or 2^nd, I will share what I’ve come up with, and I hope you will, too.

First of all, you’ve survived. That’s a huge achievement in the circumstances. If you feel you’ve accomplished nothing in the past year, you’ve achieved that, and it’s major, and it’s enough. Congratulations.

1. What are the frustrations that have crept up over the past year? What steps can you take next year to alleviate them?

• What have you learned about trust since the start of the pandemic? What people or institutions do you feel have broken your trust? How can it be mended? How can you move forward without it being mended?

• What have you learned about your relationship to silence, solitude, and isolation? How did you make use of these three elements of life? Did you enjoy any portions of it? Feel frustrated, angry, or depressed by any of it? How did you handle those emotions? How will you incorporation silence and solitude into your life moving forward? What have you learned about personal flexibility?

• What have you learned about the frictions of the social contract? Where do you feel society, as a whole, has failed in keeping with it? What is one thing you can do in the coming year that serves you as an individual, while also serving the greater social contract?

• How have you redefined work? Instead of work/life balance, have you decided that work in one element of your life and you want a more holistic approach to your whole life? Have you changed jobs or careers? Are you thinking about such changes in the coming year?

Now that you’ve pondered on what you learned, think about how to apply that to the coming year.

1.  Pick one new thing you want to try or learn in this coming year, and list three practical steps to make it happen.

• Plan a trip, whether it’s a long vacation or a short day trip. Plan it so that you can implement it once it is safe so to do, but you are not locked in, should situations change. What kind of trip is it? Feel free to share as much or as little you wish. If it’s a trip you feel can’t happen for two or three years, it’s still fun to start planning now.

• What new type of social interaction will you try this year, once it’s safe to socialize? How will you make this happen?

• How will you implement the changes you want in your work life? What three practical steps can you take over the course of the year to make it happen?

• What positive changes can you make to support your health, both mental and physical? What three practical steps can you take to make that happen?

• It’s been a long time since we dared to dream. Start exploring your dreams again, slowly. You might not have formed new dreams by the beginning of the new year, but build in time every day and every week, to work on dreaming. Then, when you feel ready, you can start thinking about the practicalities of manifesting the dream. But give yourself room, this coming year, to dream without the pressure to go beyond the dream.

• What will you do for joy this year? So much joy has been drained out of our lives for the past two years. How will you bring joy back in?

The above questions are different from the usual list-making and goal-setting, but I think we need a slower, gentler approach so that we can give ourselves permission to dream again.

In a week or so, I will put these questions up on a separate page, so that you can revisit them at any time over the next few months, and over the next year.

Peace and blessings to you, friends.