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The Old Year, and The New: Redux
In which I reflect on 2022 and look forward to 2023
The Year Past
2022 was a year in which I tried to reinvent my relationship to goal setting, self-evaluation and how I lived my life in general. In most senses, this failed. I started the year focusing on process rather than outcomes, but ended up getting dragged right back into thinking about outcomes again. Perhaps this was because it was difficult to judge how I was doing on abstract goals, or perhaps it was due to society continually shoving forward material goals to focus on.
More likely I think, is that change is hard. To accomplish something different than you have before you have to change the way your life is structured. If you want to run under three hours in the marathon, you have to train, and that time has to come from somewhere. If you want to start living more in tune with the natural world, you have to give up comforts and habits, that, at least in the short term will make your life worse. Whenever change is difficult, and it usually is, there’s some kind of “dark night of the soul”, where you actively feel that you’ve made your life worse, before you internalize the change and step out the other side, refreshed.
That said, it’s not like I didn’t make tangible progress towards my goals from the past year. I did fall back in love with…
