The Year gone by - 2017

It’s that time of the year again. Time for making resolutions with our motivation at all-time high. The time when you are positive like never - before regarding achieving your goals related to health, carrier among other areas.

It’s the first day of new year. Fortunately, it’s not a working day for me (one small ray of light amongst employee unfriendly policies formulated by my company). Hence, I can afford to be in a somewhat relaxed frame of mind. Have some moments of pause before the usual madness and rat-race starts. For the past few years; I have been following the practice of setting goals / resolution for the new year and striving to follow them. Although the progress is not too great. But like I said before, you get a blank slate this time of the year where-in you can write whatever you want.

But before that, need to look at progress against goals set for last year.

I set a lot of goals last year (Eight! in total) and divided them into two main categories of Physical health and Mental health.

Physical health was regarding improvement in health and stamina. The obvious stereotypes of reducing weight (from 76.5 to 72) was there besides my regular entry for last many years in the form of attending half marathon. The pending two entries was also very much cliché. Those were Yoga and weight training (Though antagonistic to each other; I did not even start either one of them).

Regarding weight reduction target. I made some honest efforts towards achieving this goal. Heck I even tried GM diet plan; which off course did not go well. More about that is covered in another Blog post. In the end the only take away was that I formed a habit of drinking Green tea. Now it tastes less bitter than before. As for tangible results. The weighing scale now reads around 75.4 as per below snapshot. Which is way short of target (70-72) though some improvement from my weight at starting of year.

Regarding my second target of half marathon. It was a big failure just like last year and the year before. Strangely I’m reluctant to drop it from my bucket list even though I’m not able to show any appreciable progress against it (some jogging in room and brisk walk in the park once in the blue moon is not counted as progress)

Yoga and weight training is again big failure. Just like the previous target of half marathon. I could only achieve some stretching and Tadasan (both just before bath) which I’m ashamed to even term as first step. To be able to call it as first step towards achieving the goals. I need to do so much more than just stretching and one simple primary school grad Asan. Somewhere in the middle of the year. I was at the stage of doing Surya-Namaskar and more rigorous stretching including push up. But then I dropped it just like that. Whether you call it Procrastination or any thing else. I was not able to keep up the tempo and take it to next level.

The second category of my goals for last year was Mental Health. And in the category, I have four goals of Blogs, Books, Writing and hobby.

The first target was blogging. This is something which I have started somewhere in 2012. Since then I’m trying to take it to next level. Since 2012 I’ve been averaging 8-9 blog posts per year except for 2014 when I could do only 4. For last year my target as 12-15 posts. And the achievement against target was well… 8 blog posts. The only solace there is that these 8 posts are proper blog posts this time unlike previous some years when I could pass on some random quote as blog posts. Whereas this year I strive to keep at least 1000 words as minimum word-count for the Blog post. It would have been nice to have at-least 9 posts this year so than I could match the maximum limit but alas it was not to be. I did not even have a blog post on my birthday which was a common occurrence since last many years.

The next target was books. The one target that I not only achieve but over exceed. And this the pattern since last many years. In fact, I should not even put this in goals anymore if this is so easy to achieve. The reason I put it there is because it is very important for me to be a well-read person. I tried to shift my focus from quantity to quality this year but that is something very difficult to measure. In nutshell, the books target was revised frequently upwards only and still I was able to complete it.

Similarly, my last two targets of mental health were utter failure. Those were writing my own book and developing one recreational hobby respectively. I don’t even have any excuse or anything to give consolation for these targets. Simply put, there was no progress or start for this aim. Period.

In the hindsight, the year gone by was very eventful no doubt. I was very busy throughout the year even if the priorities and productivity was not right. I also made perhaps one of the biggest decision of my life of buying a house. The experiences involved in house hunting, finalization and buying are so myriad and vivid that it will warrant more than one blog posts. Perhaps I will cover more about that in other post.

But comparing to progress made against the goals. It was very disappointing to say the least.

Right now, my new year goals seem to fulfil the purpose of making up a few entries in target for no of blog posts.

Other than that, its relevance is really in doubt now.

PS: One of the quote that I read very recently was something on the lines of

“Living same year 75 times in not called life”. It stayed with me. It has become sort of pattern now to set goals every year. Next time onward; I need to see what can be done differently to ensure better results.