New Year, New Direction

It is time for a change. What will that change be? I do not know, but I know that it is time for a change.

I miss some aspects of working, (retired) but not the work. The social aspect, but I do not miss some of those people. Archery is OK, as are some of the people, but others are idiots, children, children in adult bodies, and noisy teens, and a few humans sprinkled in. I must accept all; that is trying some days. At other times the range is empty, except for me. But twice each week for an hour or so is enough.

In the Smart Recovery Handbook, there is a Life Balance Exercise. That is essentially divide your life up into a number of small portions and look at each portion separately. An inventory of self actions, likes, dislikes, limitations, and the like. Some of us suffer from short memory and uninterested is some portions. This shows up elsewhere under a variety of names like "circle of life".  A short look and I realized these are all different, confused, and incomplete.

I suggest that there are a number of categories and sub-categories, that vary over time. Here is a start of the mains:

• Relationships
• Environmental
• Physical health
• Mental Health
• Finance 
• Purpose 

To these we need to add some processes like: education, study, working on, learning about, social activities, sports, time management, decision making, handling of the opportunity costs of decisions, etc.

Relationships: can be broken down into: family, parents, children, wife, spouse, friends,  friend A, B, C.... , coworkers A, B, C .... , colleagues, critics, mentors for A, B, C etc.

Environment: is a potentially big group, and may include property, place, time, stuff, things, as well as environment per say.

Physical health: would include sleep, exercise, nutrition, food plan, diet, our outlook on physical risk, activities, recreation and leisure, artistic endeavors, and the like.

Mental health: would include spirituality, our belief system, desires, aversions, stress handling, or stress avoidance, stress detachment, examination and cleaning of our belief system, recreation and leisure, artistic endeavors again, etc.

Finance: career, work, advancement education, accumulation of wealth, retirement...

Purpose: Motivation, direction, forward looking, Positive Psychology, Stoicism, Non-theistic or evolutionist, truth seeking, nature accepting, service, volunteerism, politics, religion, faith, peace seeking, what ever makes us tic...etc.

And then there is the difficulty of doing it all. What do we do with aunts or friends that are insistent food pushers, and expect us to sit there in front of food? And all the time we know we cannot eat, yet the sight of food primes us to eat?  

Now all I need to do is to go do it. But then, what do I know?