As the last days of the year are approaching, we are used to say it’s time to take stock of what we lived during the last twelve months. We assess our achievements, our failures. And we try to start the new year that’s coming with a certain load of good intentions.
It is more or less the same every year, since we were children, writing down on a letter to Santa or to our parents (which we later discovered was pretty the same) sweet promises of a better behaviour and a more committed intention in our tasks.
Becoming adults, we discover that on the long run life looks like a balance sheet, a kind of “zero sum” game. Sometimes we experience trouble and pain. Sometimes we strongly feel love, happiness and joy.
In effect, life is much more than a cold accountant’s routine and this depends on what is our perspective in assessing what we are living and what we are going to live.
In other terms, it’s basically a matter of expectations and intentions.
Everytime we practice a technique on the mat injecting our expectations and our non purified intentions, the technique is doomed to failure. It is a common experience. More: maybe it’s a law of the nature.
Outside the mat…What does it happen when we accurately plan everything in order that everything can flow easy in our jobs, in our relationships, everywhere?
Well, it happens that some unknown variable comes out of the blue and if we are not more than able to be flexible and adaptive to the unpredictable, we experience a total failure. And, anyway, the original plan is dramatically forced to change.
Smooth planning exists only on the perfect pages of management and organizational behaviour books -and it’s good to know the theory because reality can be decoded also thanks to modeling capabilities. Yet, it’s not enough.
We dream about our Christmas holidays for months… And typically we get a flu.
We think we can be happier changing our job… And the plot changes only the names of the actors and the scene.
We aspire to higher values… And everyday a thousand troubles pull us down to the muddy Earth.
So, is it bad to have some expectation? To aspire to a better scenario? To draft a list of good intentions for the new year?
No it’s not.
But, as people who are walking along a path trying to follow its discipline and its principles, we have to remember that while change is unavoidable as time flies, our enhancement is a choice.
So we wish for ourselves and for everyone who reads these pages that the new year may bring to everyone of us the capability to focus our intentions on what really enhances us, making us better individuals and freeing us from that enormous amount of distorted intentions that actually block us while convincing that we are active on the track of our unreachable happiness.
Happy New Year
Andrea & Sara