My new year’s resolution: don’t worry about goals

In my first post, “A letter to my pre-COVID-19 self,” I wrote about many of the commitments I’ve taken on since I began my “shelter-in-place” experience in March 2020. Every day is different: I might explore career opportunities, take a Spanish lesson, practice an aikido technique, or work on a story to share with my writing group.

But after many months of living this new, more diverse lifestyle; instead of feeling fulfilled, I started to become impatient. I’d love to find my dream job or become fluent in Spanish or earn my next aikido belt or publish a novel. But because I was spread so thin, it felt like it would take forever to fulfill any of these dreams.

When I discussed this struggle with people, one common response I got was, “Brad, you’re doing too much. If you want to accomplish your goals, you need to decide what’s a priority.”

This makes sense in theory, but whenever I try to narrow my focus, I stress over all the areas I’m neglecting. I could, for instance, decide that writing a novel is the most important thing to me and commit several hours every day to that purpose. But it wouldn’t take long before I felt like my relationships, my physical and mental health, and other parts of my life were suffering as a result.

This conundrum led me to start the new year with a question: “How can I invest in all of the dimensions of my life that are important to me and still feel like I’m doing ‘enough’ in each area?”

I believe part of the answer is to focus less on goals and learn to enjoy the present moment.

How thinking ahead holds me back

Buddhist monk and author, Thich Nhat Hanh, has helped me learn to focus less on the outcome of an action and more on the act itself. He perfectly illustrates this in his passage on the difference between “washing the dishes to have clean dishes” and “washing the dishes to wash the dishes”:

If while washing dishes, we think only of the cup of tea that awaits us, thus hurrying to get the dishes out of the way as if they were a nuisance, then we are not “washing the dishes to wash the dishes.” What’s more, we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes. In fact we are completely incapable of realizing the miracle of life while standing at the sink. If we can’t wash the dishes, the chances are we won’t be able to drink our tea either. While drinking the cup of tea, we will only be thinking of other things, barely aware of the cup in our hands. Thus we are sucked away into the future–and we are incapable of actually living one minute of life.

Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation. Beacon Press, 1975, 1976.

After I read this, I became more conscious of how I wash the dishes. It’s amazing how hard it is for me to stay in the moment. My mind wants to get the process over with so I can move on to other things. I become anxious, hunch over the sink, scrub furiously and often end up splashing water all over the counter and myself. That’s assuming I do the dishes at all–when I treat this experience as a chore, it’s very easy to just put it off.

But when I allow myself to be in the moment, to focus on one piece at a time, on how I breathe and position my body and hold the item as I wash and rinse and dry it, it becomes a much more pleasurable experience. I feel relaxed, I’m more thorough, and I have less cleanup to do afterward.

I’ve begun to explore how I can apply the idea of “washing the dishes to wash the dishes” in my other activities.

Walk to walk, not to get somewhere

When I go for a walk, I tend to be in a rush to get to my destination. I feel like there’s a motor inside of me, driving me to walk faster. If I don’t know the way, I look at the turn-by-turn directions on my GPS and just focus on street signs, not my surroundings. (This might explain why I have terrible navigation skills: I don’t get visual cues from scenery and landmarks because I don’t pay attention to them. I plan to explore this in a future post.) By the time I get home, my feet are aching and I’m exhausted.

Now I try to walk just to walk. I’ve made a conscious effort to slow down. With each step, I try to be aware of my posture, relax my shoulders, and feel every part of my foot making contact with the ground. Sometimes my mind wanders and my pace quickens, but I catch myself and slow down again.

I also look around more. I recently moved to a new neighborhood. On my usual route, I glance at a window covered in brown paper; a sad reminder that one of my favorite local restaurants is gone for good because of COVID-19. But the other day, as I approached this scene, I did something miraculous: I turned my head. There were two other restaurants right next to this one. I took a 2-minute detour to check them out. Both were open and looked delicious.

I still made it to my destination, perhaps a few minutes later than normal, but my feet felt fine and my spirits were lifted by the idea of having two new places to try.

The one-item to-do list

I try to keep weekly and daily to-do lists. I’m pretty good about writing down tasks every day. I’m not so good at completing them. Each morning, I record everything I intend to finish that day. Then I feel an enormous sense of pressure. Where do I start? How much time can I afford to spend on each activity and get them all done? What happens if other things come up that are more urgent?

Most days, I end up completing fewer than half my tasks. I see all the unchecked boxes and feel like I failed. Then I add those items to the next day’s plan along with whatever else I “need” to get done, and the cycle repeats. I get more frustrated as more tasks are left unfinished, and I question why I should even bother tracking my to-do’s.

For the past week or so, though, I’ve changed my approach. Each day, after I review my calendar, I scan my weekly to-do list and pick the one thing I want to work on right now. I don’t get impatient about moving on to the next task because there is no next task.

When I focus on what I’m doing rather than what’s left to do, it’s much easier for me to enjoy myself. But I also find that when I don’t worry about how productive I am, I become more productive. The joy of staying in the moment energizes me to keep going. And because of this, every day I follow the practice of the “one-item to-do list,” I get a lot more done.

Learning: focus on what I know, not what I don’t know

I meet online with a Spanish tutor a couple of times a week. For some of our lessons, he sends me a link to an article in Spanish. Before I look at the text, he asks me to listen to an audio recording of the article and try to explain what I heard.

I tend to get very frustrated with myself during this part of the lesson. I quickly encounter a word I don’t understand. Then part of my brain gets stuck on this word while another part tries to keep listening. The more words I get stuck on, the harder it is to pay attention. By the end of the article, I feel lost and defeated. I wonder how I’m ever going to be able to carry on a real conversation when my listening skills and comprehension are so weak.

However, the last time my tutor shared one of these articles, I decided to stay in the moment. If I didn’t understand something, I let it go. Sometimes I could figure it out in context. Sometimes I just accepted that I didn’t get it, knowing I could ask questions later. I just tried to relax, listen, and appreciate what I could understand.

When the time came to recount what I’d heard, to my amazement, I was able to paraphrase more than half of the article and we spent most of the rest of the lesson discussing our thoughts on the topic.

Goals: Set them and forget them

I’m not suggesting that having goals is bad. It’s great to strive to do more for yourself and for others. But we can’t control the future. Not everything will work out as we envisioned, many goals will take longer to achieve than we expected, and there are many others we’ll never reach.

Whether I’m walking somewhere, planning my day, or learning a new skill; when all I care about is getting to the end, every step feels exhausting.

But when I choose to let go of the future and instead live in the present, I feel more at peace and can actually begin to enjoy myself. And from what I’ve seen so far, the more I learn to enjoy the journey, the more likely it is I’ll get to my destination.

Is there something you want in your life that you’re struggling to obtain? Do you spend time on activities you wish you could enjoy more? How might it change your experience if you let go of the goal and just focused on the experience?