An interesting thing about posting on the first Saturday of each month is that, every year, I get to write an article during the first week of the new year. For the last few years, I’ve written about setting specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-based goals. And, being honest, that’s what I was originally going to write about this year.
But, here’s the thing: I haven’t achieved anything I set out to do last year.
See, the last couple of years have thrown one spanner after another at me. At this point, I have enough spanners to start my own spanner store. But what I don’t have is a lot of writing to show for it.
Well, unless writing about spanners counts.
So this year I want to write about something different. I want to write about looking objectively at the reality of our lives and the world we live in, and planning our goals from there.
The World Kinda Sucks
There’s a part of my brain that tells me that the world doesn’t suck right now any more than it’s always sucked. The issues and problems facing the world-as-a-whole right now aren’t new. There have always been dangerous politicians and discrimination and looming environmental disasters. None of this is new.
But the other part of my brain is jumping around like a frog on meth, shouting that things have never been this bad.
Maybe it’s the 24-hour news cycle, or the way social media makes everything feel more personal, or the fact that I’m a parent now, and more worried about the future than I’ve been before. Maybe it’s just that it feels impossible to escape the over-arching feeling that the world isn’t going to hell in the proverbial handbasket, because it’s already arrived and we’re too busy trying to make the handbasket climb back up the hill to pay attention to anything else.
Whatever it is, it’s almost impossible (for me, at least) to concentrate on crafting authentic, believable, fictional worlds when the real world jumped the shark a couple of seasons ago.
Look out! The Spanners are Coming!
But it’s not just the about the state of the world. It’s also about my life. A couple of years ago, I had a solid writing plan. My kids were both in school, and I was going to go back to university part-time and spend the rest of my suddenly child-free hours writing.