What Do You Want… from Your New Year
You’ve had the new year to kick around for a month, and by now forgotten all those resolutions. Have you thought about what you really want from this coming year?
Perhaps you launched into 2025 with great excitement, looking forward to great things! Or, perhaps you just wandered into the new year feeling like it was just any other day. New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day are indeed just another day like any other, but sometimes the start of something can be a great time to wipe the slate clean and start anew. If only…
You Can Make It What You Want… If You Know What You Want
Those of you who read my “How I Spent My Summer Breakation” article here in November know that 2024 was a pretty lousy and difficult year for me personally. And now that I’ve been healing for six months, I’m ready for 2025 to be a year of renewal, new focus, and greater opportunity to really enjoy my life, my family, and my friends. The continuing aches are a constant reminder that I must “do the work” if I want to get myself fully healed. I do want that, but I also want much more.
Setting the Baseline
“Nothing’s going to change until someone gets hurt or killed…”
You’ve probably heard that said about more dangerous things as much as I have and, unfortunately, it’s usually all too terribly true. We tend to fail to learn. And there never seems to be time to do things right, but always time to do them over.
So the baseline for 2025 from my perspective is that we have put a dangerous individual in charge of our country, our mistake this time, and he is inflicting a cast of miscreants to help him “run” the country… perhaps into the ground.
What we have to look forward to is seeing each of these unqualified people make terrible and very costly mistakes that will have to be corrected at great expense to all of us and our families. In essence, we’ll have to burn to learn. It may be that the pain we endure will be the only thing that can shake and shock our elected officials back to sanity. But I’m not holding my breath.
Setting Priorities
It’s almost impossible for everything to be equally important. When you make everything the same, it becomes impossible to know which to focus on first. So we set priorities, and reset them, and reset them until we’re satisfied.
One of the joys of writing this Substack is that I can go back through the archives and be prompted to think about all the kinds of things I might want from this coming year. What do I want to do this year? What do I want to have? What do I want to experience? What do I want to achieve? And so on…
As I writer, my natural process has been to go to each of these and write a list. Once I have these lists, I can go through each of them and sort them into priority order with the most important to me being at the top, and so on down from there. Then, I can take the top from each list, gather them together, and decide which of them I want to focus on first, then second, and so on. This breaks the prioritizing process down into smaller chunks, making it easier for me to tackle.
Let’s briefly discuss process for each.
What do I want to do?
There are always so many things we want to do. Things we want to do for our careers. Things we want to do for those around us, for our community, for family, for friends, for the less fortunate. For animals.
Here again we can make lists for each of those categories and others, prioritize them, and set about doing them from the top down.
One thing that will become obvious as we move through our lists is the need to think through why we want to do the things we do, and what we’ll need to do to get them done. This kind of evaluation may lead us to move certain things up or down our list or, in some cases, to abandon them altogether as being either not really worthwhile, or just too difficult to invest the time to attempt.
Investment of time is an element that increases in importance with age. You begin to think about how much time you may have left in your lifetime to do the things you want to do. This may help you filter out the truly important from the merely urgent or attractive. My best example is to adopt another puppy. We’ve had multiple dogs living with us for many years, but now the three we have are aging and I’d like to rescue and raise one more puppy.
But do I have 15 years left to commit to a puppy? I absolutely refuse to ever abandon a dog as that would compromise more of my soul than I could ever stand. I watched my mentor go through this when his last dog passed and he decided not to adopt another. I couldn’t imagine, at that time, how he could live without a dog. Now, many years later I do understand. He decided not to adopt for the sake of the dog he would have adopted. I can now appreciate how deep a sacrifice that was for him.
Perhaps the most important consideration, however, is the “why” of what you want to do. What is your real motivation? Is it to increase your prestige? To increase your income? To increase your knowledge? All of these and similar are definitely as valid as they are to you, but there’s one more motivation that overrides all of them:
Because You Want To.
You have the absolute right to decide you want to do something simply because you want to. Because it gratifies you. Fulfills you. Gives you great satisfaction. That’s it! Punto. Done. The time in your life is your time to spend, and you should always spend it enjoying what you do as much as possible. Your job, as Buddha and Neil Armstrong have pointed out to us so vividly, is to spend as many moments of your life experiencing joy as you possibly can.
What do I want to have?
Again, there are many things you’ll want to have that exist in many different parts of your life. You’ll want to have promotion and recognition in your work. You’ll want to have true and abiding love. You’ll want material things to enjoy, such as a bigger home or a better car.
You may also want to have less palpable things, like happiness. Satisfaction. Excitement. You may crave danger and “living at the edge.”
You may also want to have more palpable things, like a boat. Or the latest videogames. Or other stuff.
Once again, as a human being you have the absolute right to want to have anything you really want to have, but you must carefully consider why you want to have them, and what it will cost you to obtain them. Beyond money, will having the job of your dreams, or the mate of your dreams, require you to compromise your values or your integrity? Can you accept that cost? These questions can only be answered by you, but they must only be answered by you to yourself. You require nobody else’s approval.
If you want it, and you’re willing to do what you must to get it, and you can accept the cost, then by all means go get it.
What do I want to experience?
This one is actually tougher. Many have recommended that you spend less of your money on things and spend more on experiences. Travel. Exploration. Living at the edge. Spending time with loved ones.
Some things you want to experience may be beyond your ability to obtain by yourself. Peace in our time is something you can contribute to in many ways, but not something you can achieve without the involvement of others, sometimes many others.
Some things you want to experience, such as the continuing respect of your children, depend completely upon someone else. In this case, your children. You can never tell them to respect you if they don’t feel respect for you. All you can do is work to earn their respect, and it may already be too late. How do you recover from that?
In fact, there are many things you may want to experience, such as leadership, which may need to be earned over time. It’s hard if not impossible to shortcut these. Even when you think you have, that shortcut may turn out to simply be a cheat, and the ones cheated will usually include yourself.
When it comes to experiencing anything, you have the right to want it and the right to strive for it and to earn it. But nothing guarantees you will ever experience it.
What do I want to achieve?
Fabled thought leader Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People said that his personal mission was, “To live, to learn, to love, and to leave a legacy.”
That last objective, leaving a legacy, deserves our attention.
One of the great concepts in Buddhism is to learn to embrace impermanence, the concept that nothing lasts forever. Recognizing this and coming to terms with it helps us to achieve peace and contentment within our lives.
Another is interbeing. This is the concept that we are all connected, all part of a greater whole. The idea that some of the molecules that now make up our bodies once made up a stone, or a tree, or a meteor hurtling through space. The first law of thermodynamics teaches us that energy cannot be created nor destroyed. It can only be transformed from one form into another. The second rule says the same about mass. The elements of everything are constantly transforming. We truly are what we eat!
To continue to exist in this universe, we must forward part of ourselves onward. In one respect, this is the role of DNA. The intrinsic code that makes us who we are is made up of parts of the code handed down to us from every ancestor we have back into antiquity. Someone thousands of years ago had DNA that led to the DNA within us today, and that we will pass forward to our descendants.
For me, that translates into making sure that my grandchildren live to bear children of their own who can carry our bits of DNA forward into the future. That is our path to immortality from a purely biological perspective. It gives me great comfort to know that my two grandsons are healthy, happy young people. My only worry is about the livability of the world we are bequeathing to them.
Then there is the other immortality.
I have come to believe, and will be writing about this more in future posts here in What Do You Want? about the fundamental nature of life lying not in any of our biology, like the brain or the heart, or the ephemeral soul, but rather in the information that we process and share. The first computer, and still the most powerful, is the brain in each of our heads. It can still process information in subtle ways that no other computer yet can. That may change in the next few years, but at the time of this writing nothing matches the human brain for subtlety and complexity.
Stephen King wrote, in his wonderful “On Writing” that writing is a form of mind reading. The writer sends their thoughts and the reader receives them. If that’s true then anyone may write something today that other people will share long after they’re gone. What could be a more meaningful legacy than sharing information, observations, and thoughts about an experience happening today that get read by someone in a thousand or two thousand years.
Every time I think about this I find my envying Plato and his contemporaries, Buddha, Jesus Christ, and others whose writings and teachings have been handed forward generation after generation for thousands of years. Their thoughts are still alive and well with us, eons after their biological bodies ran out of life.
So my goal for 2025 is to write something that can remain valuable to others for decades, perhaps even centuries to come. And I’m running out of time…
