Goals

I made a list.

Usually I think lists at the new year are pointless. We all say this is the year I will do this or that and none of us ever really does it. We lose steam around the end of January and by spring we have forgotten what we were committed to do.

This year is truly different, though, because of the nature of our 2020. We've had ten months to reflect upon our lives without the usual distractions, and we're going to have another four or five months to continue that reflection under the same circumstances, and that is best case scenario. Many Americans have realized that the things they thought were so important - like sports - really aren't, that maybe civic engagement matters. I want to believe they've realized that, anyway. I'll refrain from haranguing the MAGA crowd right now; it seems they have not only learned nothing, but they've actively fought against learning anything at all.

This year, having nowhere to go forced me to confront my neglect of the many interests I have. Until countries closed their borders to Americans, my life revolved around the one or two trips abroad I got to take each of the last six or seven years. When I wasn't planning the trips or experiencing the trips or looking at my photographs from the trips, I was dreaming of the trips. Perhaps the most productive thing I have done in my personal time is my garden, which is a kind of tiny park my neighbors love. I am motivated by them as much as I am by the plants themselves. The rest of my time I spent watching baseball or hockey and drinking beer in bars and wasting time on social media.

One day you wake up and you realize that half your life is over and you wonder what have you actually done with it because it feels like you have all of these snapshots tucked away in a photo album collecting dust on a shelf. I have always loved living in Washington, DC and I love living on Capitol Hill and I make a good salary at a good company, but I feel unfulfilled. I think of all the pursuits I've had that I have failed to follow through on and wonder why I never let them get anywhere. The books I've wanted to write, the businesses I've wanted to start, the post-graduate degrees I've wanted to pursue...they never get done. Part of the reason is that I get distracted too easily and I jump from one thing to another without ever finishing anything. I don't know if I've always been like that or if this is an age of mobile phone development. I have the attention span of a gnat these days. Even the 500 words of this blog post at this point have taken me an hour to write, because I stare out the window, my thoughts drifting from work to the stack of unfinished books on the table to thinking about my cookbook to worrying about my plants. 

So I made a list. 

Will I stick to it?