There is a site called 10Q that asks 10 questions (one a day) during the days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The questions ask the respondent to reflect on the previous year and to start thinking about goals and aspirations for the year to come. Shortly before Rosh Hashanah, 10Q sends you your responses to the previous year’s questions. I recently received last year’s responses and took some time to read through them and remember where I was about this time last year and how far I have come since then.
Overall, I am fairly happy with how far I have come. Although I didn’t achieve all of the goals I set for myself, I certainly made progress on all of them. My goals tend to be perennial (e.g. continuing to learn new things, pushing myself out of my comfort zone, etc.), so most are going to reappear on this year’s list, although some have gotten bumped for other priorities that have risen to the surface. I have a newly heightened awareness of the preciousness of any time I spend with my father. As much as I continue to absolutely adore my niecelettes, my primary reason for going east this coming year will be to see my father. The good news is that I stay at my brother’s house when I am in New York, so my niecelettes come with the accommodations. In the past I scheduled seeing my parents around my desire to maximize time with the girls. Now, I am aiming to maximize my time with my father during the time of day when he is at his most alert.
I am pleased to see progress in both my professional and personal development. This time around I intend to include better benchmarks of where I started so I can get a better sense of where to place the milestones for measuring my progress. I have to be somewhat careful in how precisely I measure because I don’t want this annual practice to become too much about quantifying my life. I believe life is more about quality than quantity and my decisions often reflect that.
There is plenty left to do, but overall, I am feeling fairly accomplished and eager to take on what this coming year has to throw at me. Not that I want to tempt fate. It would be nice to have a relatively quiet year where the happy occasions outnumber the sad ones by a fair margin.