Creating Resolutions, perhaps even a Bucket List for 2010
For many of our readers, January starts a New Year, an opportunity for a new life.
Historically, however, New Years was first celebrated by the Babylonians about 4,000 years ago on what is now March 23rd, on our calendar, the beginning of Spring Time and the planting of new crops. The Romans celebrated New Years on March 25th but in 153 BCE the Roman Senate declared January 1 as the beginning of the New Year. Tampering with the calendar continued until Julius Caesar in 46 CE, when the Julian calendar established January 1 as the beginning of the New Year in Western society.
For the Babylonians, their #1 resolution was to return borrowed farm equipment. Today there are many different lists of New Year’s resolutions, but the most popular top 10 seem to be:
Lose Weight
Exercise More
Eat Healthier
Take Time for Yourself
Reduce Stress
Take a Vacation
Improve Sleep Habits
Educate Yourself
Drink Less Alcohol
Volunteer to Help Others
Regardless of your situation the new year can provide another opportunity for you to:
Take charge of your life...or someone else will!
The big picture in this process of personal strategic planning has five basic steps:
Know yourself
Know your world
Make wise choices
Act decisively
Celebrate your life
Each of us a unique child of the cosmos, given hard-wired genetics from our ancestors, and thrust into a world of chaos, challenges, opportunities, and choices. What we make of this is our responsibility.
At one extreme, one can choose a light or superficial approach simply focusing on maximizing pleasure and avoiding pain. Many take this approach. For the courageous, there is the opposite extreme of personal strategic planning, the Journey Into The Self, wherein one travels deeper into one's true nature, the genuine you.
Regardless of which extreme, or combination of these extremes you take, you are admonished to celebrate the life you have, the good people in your life, the things you have, the things you do, but above all, that which you are and are becoming.
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Although I am now into my 8th decade (wow! sounds really old) of a most exciting and fulfilling life, I am planning for the future, as I do every January. The focus is on creating a list of:
10 Things I Want To Do Before I Die!* (aka a Bucket List)
I take this exciting trip of the mind, soul, and body, in spite of 2 suppressed malignancies and a pair of knee prostheses, and in the spirit of George Bernard Shaw that noted:
“When I die, I want to be all used up.”
My list for 2009 looked like this:
1) Summit Aconcagua:
2) Summit Cotopaxi:
3) Swim with the snow monkeys in Japan:
4) Take the Trans-Siberian Railway trip
5) Write a NY Times #1 Bestseller
6) Keynote fee of $10,000
7) Closer relationship with wife, Elaine
8) Simplify my life
9) Network with extended family and people from my past
10) Finish the other “promises” on Mt. Washington
However, I only worked diligently on #7, 8, 9, and 10. Truth be told, the others are really big challenges, perhaps too fanciful for me at this stage in my life, except for #4, which is in the planning stage.
In 2009, I did some very productive things that might have been on my 2009 list:
1) Mayan Calendar Quest: Visited Mayan sites in Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize to address the key dates of 21 December 2012 and 28 October 2011
2) Middle East tour: Visited Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey to work on the preface for the Arabic Edition of Optimize Your Life! , plus highlights like the pyramids, the top of Mt. Sinai on April Fool’s Day, Petra, and Easter Service in Ephesus.
3) England 2009: Spent four days at The British Museum, experienced Winter Solstice at Stonehenge, hiked Hadrian’s Wall Path, walked the streets of London including Piccadilly Circus, and enjoyed a roast goose dinner for Christmas.
For 2010, I am a bit more rational, limiting the formal list to 5 key foci:
1) Finish Current Books, “works-in-progress” namely What Better Place to
Die and Take Charge of Your Life…or Someone Else Will.
2) The Teaching Co. CDs and DVDs: Listen/study my collection again
3) Real Estate: Sell/donate real estate, one of a Promises made on Mt. Washington
4) The Trans-Siberian Railway trip: Do it while Julie Christie is still there
5) Get Rid of “Stuff”: Using the STUF concept (sort, toss, use, file) namely toss
That’s my "short" list, and I can always re-visit past lists.
What is on your list…and why?
Although my religious life, my value system is basically Judeo-Christian, I have become quite ecumenical over the years. As a Buddhist, should I “stop striving”, as a Hindu should I graciously enter the forth phase of life and “become a sannyasin, a wandering hermit, seeking only spiritual enlightenment?”
Psychologist Abraham Maslow in Hierarchy of Needs described the ultimate phase of one’s life as self-actualization, that is, going beyond the basics of life and finding one’s single “calling” and heeding it.
Single calling? How about five…even ten!
In Worth Magazine in 1999. Edward Sussman wrote an article, ”24 Things to do before you die”, which focused on interviews with celebrities. Grand dame Brooke Astor, advised one to “be gracious to someone you despise”, CNN economics guru Lou Dobbs suggested that you “thank someone instrumental in your success”, while author George Plimpton shared his vision that you should “go on a quest.”
You may not be able to ”run away with the circus” at this stage in your life, but you can:
1) do personal strategic planning
2) sneak off for a window of time, time well chosen and spent, time that will expand
your horizons, time that create powerful memories.
Enjoy the journey!
Do it now, for you never know when your time is up!
All the best-
--Bernie Dahl, M.D.
PS: Send me you New Year's 2010 list!
Every day a little birdie on my shoulder asks,
“Is today the day?”
Am I doing all the things I should be doing?
Am I being the person I should be?
-Buddha
* One of the 40+ worksheets in the Optimize Your Life! books.
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