Significant Birthdays - Why you need to plan now and avoid regrets!
It's my significant other's 40th birthday soon and I've organised a comedy night out, with beers and a curry. That's pretty good for the night itself but it made me think about my last significant birthday. It was pretty dire and gave me cause for reflection.
I was in the middle of changes then because I wanted to be in a radically different mental place by the time I got to my next big birthday. But why do we seem to wait for such milestones to reflect and make changes? Doesn't the time in the middle count? Have I done enough? Am I on the way to being happy forever? Am I being everything I can be? That whole Maslow self-actualisation need is drummed into every manager in every training about motivating staff. That's why I had a slight aversion to it for a long while until I saw the point. And one has to make changes. That's the thing about insights. You can never turn the clock back. I had to do an inventory of things that I enjoyed doing for themselves. Writing. Working on exciting projects. Learning about the history and evolution of traditions. Connecting to people's real selves. Helping people out of a tunnel. Creating, although Freud saw this as a possible sublimation activity. I know some of this is really cheesy but I can't help what I like. If only I could get paid to do it. I'm figuring this out now. Meanwhile if you have such thoughts, an inventory might help. Even starting off with the basic Wheel of Life. See one at the bottom of the page. You can add categories that apply specifically to you but it's a good basis to start from. Until then, I leave you with a gift... about what happens with insights and related changes of perception. Look at the image below and guess what it is before scrolling down to see the answer.
