Blogmas Day 15 - You're an architect
Earlier this year while I was in the trenches of planning my wedding, I was constantly overwhelmed by how many decisions there were for me and my husband to have to make in order to ensure that our day went off without a hitch. I knew we were in over our heads when the wedding coordinator asked us where we wanted to put the dance floor(if you don’t already know, cause I certainly didn’t, dance floors can be physically moved).
Prior to embarking on this very detailed and time consuming feat, I often felt bogged down by the notion that I didn’t truly understand what it meant to make a decision by myself. I would lay out the timeline of my adulthood, which by legal standards began at age 18, to the present day which tended to be whatever age I was at the time I was reflecting on this idea, and add up the tiny amount that encompassed just how many years of independent decision making I had under my belt. At almost 30, I’ve had just a little bit over a decade's worth of experience with choosing what I do and don’t want to do.
When I viewed it this way, I would find myself feeling anxious and bitter. I would think: No wonder I feel so lost. I’ve only had this much time to figure out how to actually live a life! This point of view held a magnifying glass up to every choice I had and hadn’t made and examined it in ways that usually left me feeling like a very misguided failure. Then, as one who usually feels like this does, I turned my gaze outward and looked at all the people my age and younger that seemed to be thriving and excelling in ways I could only dream of. I was convinced that it was because they just knew how to make the right decisions and I didn’t.
If you noticed by now, this is written in past tense not because grammar is my Achilles heel, it is, but because I don’t hold this belief anymore. Instead I’ve started thinking about my life as a set of blueprints. God has the original copies, but I’ve also got an idea of what kind of life I want to build. As I get older and approach new milestones and look back on old ones, I’ve started to see that each year is another opportunity to build a new window or doorway. Thinking about my life this way has significantly decreased the pressure I feel to completely reinvent myself every new calendar year. While I love goal planning, I want to become someone that executes those plans even more.
A couple of weeks ago the self productivity side of the internet was abuzz when it learned how Dodgers’ baseball star Shohei Ohtani made good on his goal to become one of the most sought after players in the league. He credited his success using the Harada method of goal setting where you have one goal, with eight supporting pillars, and each pillar contains eight related actions. The visual creates a large map of 64 items aligned around one goal.
So yeah, in conclusion, dance floors can be moved at the couples request and the color of your table linens really don’t matter as much as some wedding planner on Instagram would like you to believe.
Chat ya later!
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