Learning from the Christmas ← → New Years Limbo
Last year (and some of the previous year) I wrote a weekly reflective post entitled the Braindump. I wrote 52 of these things (plus an interlude). Around the 51 week mark I was starting to feel incredibly worn down by.. well.. just about everything.
I decided that once the final Braindump was written I was going to clear the decks a bit so that I had some space and time to consider ‘whats next?’. That didn’t turn out to be entirely successful as things just seemed to keep feeling the space I’d opened up. But since finishing work on the 22nd of December I’ve been perfecting the art of being hugely unproductive.
And you know what.. it’s been great. I’ve actively avoided doing anything that I’d do in a normal day/week. I pretty much stopped reading anything on the Internet. I’ve been playing board games with the kids. I worked my way through a backlog of games (finally finished Grand Theft Auto V.. which I started in Dec 2015.. that’s value for money!). I’ve been watching huge amounts of Netflix series that I’ve had earmarked for ages. I’ve been taking the dog out at different times of day on different routes.
None of this has moved me any closer to sharpening my aims for 2018… BUT.. I feel like the frustration I described in Braindump #51 is dissipating. To such a degree that reading it now is akin to an out of body experience. I recognise the words but no longer feel the emotion associated with them.
This is a useful personal reminder that sometimes the best way forward is to just STOP for a while. Languish in the totally different. Luxuriate in a detour from the norm. So perhaps I have accidentally found one aim for 2018! Do less. Carve out space where other things might happen.. or not. 🙂