Chose your own adventure, part 44
22:15
What to learn in 2025? What to make? Every year calendar is a great big green field of possibilities.
Every year is like that and every year is littered with ideas that never made it past ideas. Goals that never made it past goals. Resolutions, if I were to ever use the word explicitly, that never got resolved. When planning for the upcoming year, 90% of the work is in making the plan and 10% is in ignoring the plan once it's made.
Yet, I enjoy the exercise of imagining the possibilities.
Year on year, I think more about systems than goals. I suppose that is partially driven by the impending sense of doom as years pile on years and the original parts start to wear out. Performance giving way to maintenance.
So some of the thoughts about 2025 are about keeping things going. Posting Chinese Word of the Day every day. List books and other things for sale at Cedar Creek Trail Books every day. Running or lifting or exercising every day. Find some loose goal out there on the horizon and herd things in that direction.
But what to learn? What to make? Harder questions. The direction ought to be more tight than loose. A thing to make has to make the transition from idea to thing. Learning something complex implies an ongoing course, a direction, a going-from and a going-to.
Even more difficult: how to avoid the buffet problem? How to avoid what happens every year: I'm going to learn this and that and that and that. Happens every year. I understand the math. There's time to focus on one thing sometimes. What happens when I try to focus ("focus") on several new things and focus ("focus") on them all at once? Two consecutive days of spending 10 minutes on each thing followed by the subsequent remainder-of-year not doing any of them—all while feeling some remorse about having not done anything. Every time. Like Charlie Brown and the football. Whoosh. Argh. Again.
Focus. Try one thing. Hold other things at arms length until I'm satisfied with that one thing. Then move on. Ignore the feeling of missing out on something. Nothing to learn is really missed out on. Not everything can be learned. The only thing you can miss out on is people, relationships. Those aren't things, they're something else. Beyond the scope, etc.
Start small. Start very small. Add one thing, make it work.