Picture Courtesy: longmontsymphony.org
Recently I was having a conversation with a very dear friend of mine. And since 2022 is almost here, we were of course talking about resolutions and what kind of goals we want to set for ourselves for the upcoming year. It is a yearly tradition rather, for my friend and I to sit together and form a whole document of our new year’s resolutions. So at the end of this year as well we were just going over our resolutions from 2020 which none of us actually looked at throughout this year, so out of the 13 resolutions I made, I was able to achieve 10 which if you ask me is pretty great progress. As for my friend, she was able to achieve 11 out of her 14 resolutions so I believe you could say we pretty much killed it.
Moving on to 2022, my friend asked me if I had decided my resolutions for the upcoming year and I did have a pretty rough idea- I just had to write them down now.
When I asked her, however, if she has figured out some of hers, she said ‘I don’t want to force myself to you know work on myself anymore’
This statement ofcourse deeply confused me
I asked her ‘I don’t mean to say that you have to force yourself but don’t you want to do things like maybe repairing your relationship with your body or work towards being in a better place mentally?’
She said ‘frankly I just don’t want to force myself to continuously think about focusing on these issues, I just want to go with the flow’
Now I did refrain from continuing this discussion but it did bring a very interesting commonly held belief about working on yourself to my attention. Something about the concept of ‘going with the flow’ which really intrigues me is that people tend to believe that the opposite of the latter is hyper-focusing on every minor issue in your life and pressuring yourself into changing its course. These are only however the two ends of the spectrum- its viewing life in black and white. The grey area in this situation is, taking control of what you know you CAN control and not letting the anxiety of the uncontrollable consume you.
In her book, 101 essays that will change the way you think, Brianna Wiest writes ‘Striking a fine balance between what you can and cannot control in your life, is to steer the ship along with the current, not against it. It does not mean to surrender all control or effort, it simply means to wield it more wisely.