Making Way for the New

In my corporate avatar, may he rest in peace, I could never honor my commitment to the arts because there were way too many things that demanded my attention all the time. I was perpetually busy and all my personal aspiration inevitably found themselves on my "some day" list. I did not realize then that a lot of what I was "attending to" were really very temporal and superficial tasks that did not add true value to my being. However, I am thankful to have those days behind me since they have made me who I am today.

One of the places where I learned a lot about how to be meaningfully productive and pursue my passion was through the writing of +Shankari Sundaram. Shankari is an aspiring novelist and a productivity blogger who I had the good fortune of connecting with at our first Hyderabad Bloggers' Meet in 2012. She juggles homemaking and two young kids and still manages to stay on top of her writing targets. Not surprisingly, her blog is called Oh! I Juggle. It is my honor to share with you this extremely useful guest post that she wrote for Subho's Jejune Diet.

The New Year came and went and is not so new anymore. But, many of us are still thinking about the year gone by. Of dreams that were fulfilled, those that were born and some that had to be buried. In between endings and beginnings is a wonderful time to reflect, rejoice and renew. As soon as reflections are done, thoughts immediately move to the coming year. The future is very interesting that way. There is so much flexibility in it. Since it has not yet happened, the future is spontaneously hopeful. Anything seems possible. Most of us capture that wonderful feeling of promise by immediately drawing up plans, creating a blueprint for our dreams. That is all good. I truly believe in goal setting and targeted action for creating desired results.

I also believe that New Year resolutions are not just a whimsical list of things you think you want to do. After all, the purpose of life is not to clutter our days with incoherent busyness. It is also not to manufacture yardsticks and milestones of performance that we can touch and then show off to the world. Success is such a personal measure of value. It can rarely be defined in universal terms. True, business success is usually measured in financial terms. It is certainly simpler that way. Numbers are a clear measure and it is easy to fall into the trap of measuring success only that way. We instinctively follow similar guidelines to measure success in our professional and personal lives too. There is nothing wrong in wanting to achieve more, pushing ourselves to do that little extra which might make all the difference. Wisdom is to recognize where to put in the extra and where to pull back. Extending and stretching in all directions is not a recipe for contentment.

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