Before the year goes by in a blur, it’s time to hit the pause button & reflect

Some people are great at making plans. For them, there’s a clear distinction between one year and the next. Many are even capable of putting their plans into action.

I’m not those people. It’s not that I can’t see what will take me from point A to point B.

I can write a good list or plan a route as ably as the next person. But while my computer desktop may be littered with “to-do” lists, it’s the adherence part that stumps me.

Years seem to hurtle past, blending one into another. Before I know it, my list becomes a jumble of good intentions.

I’ve told myself I have a valid defence. As a card-carrying member of a frazzled and wild-eyed group of people called the “sandwich generation”, I’m too busy to stop and re-organise lists.

The sandwich isn’t a terribly accurate analogy for this group I’m in. Squashed between the two “slices” that are my children and a parent, I’m apparently the vivid pink polony filling. Which is exactly where the likeness fails.

Because polony does little more than occupy space, hardening at the edges and growing even less appealing with age.

Conspicuous puns aside, running two households and caring for multitudes, I’m doing a lot more than occupying space. I barely have time to aspire to be a healthier alternative, let alone reflect or plan.

I know this isn’t sustainable. All my blurry activity is either routine or obligation, undertaken sometimes reluctantly, often hastily, and all too frequently, mechanically.

“Ugh! I’m so bad at this,” I wail to a friend after realising that the extent of my reflection on the year gone by is that someone must have pressed the fast-forward button.

Said friend, who quietly reinvented herself during lockdown as a personal and corporate coach, is the perfect person to run to when I’m stuck. Coaching someone through a difficult period or a complex change seems as natural to her as breathing.

“If you were coaching me right now,” I ask her, “what questions would you ask to help me become less appalling at planning for 2022?”

“What’s the thing that surprised you most about 2021?” she fires back. My answer, surfacing almost instantaneously, can only mean this had been bothering me, and I’d been mulling it over for a while without appreciating its significance.

Having thrived in 2020 while working from home and cocooning with my people, both of which I’d craved for years, it surprised me that 2021 seems to have been a year of stagnation, and, alarmingly in some areas, regression.

By who knows what witchcraft, my clever friend’s deceptively simple question revealed two things. I’ve been on a hamster wheel of busyness for so long, that I’d forgotten I could choose to get off. And believing I’m bad at planning had become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

By lurching from one seemingly urgent thing to the next, with no action plan to steer me in any sensible direction, all I was able to do was tread water.

The problem with the years whistling past my ears is that I don’t have an infinite amount of them to play with.

There’s real value in taking the time to reflect on a bygone year and plan how to tackle the next, not least of which is taking control of how I move forward. Which feels like an excellent way to start 2022.