Three Questions for Life Perspective

Posted in evolution on 17.05.06@781 by pjh

I went through an interesting exercise yesterday. In trying to get out of a recent funk, I tried to answer three questions. The three questions helped to provide focus and motivation, but I’m still waiting for fullness.

The questions are these, and I spent 10 minutes answering each of them:

What do you want your life to be like when you’re 60?

For me, that’s nearly 30 years away. If you’re older than me you might want to push it out so that it’s at least 25 years into the future. This question was interesting because it’s far enough removed that you can accomplish pretty much anything you set your mind to by then. For myself, I don’t want to be worrying about money, or needing to work for somebody else. Given my parents ill health, I definitely want to keep myself in good shape.

Also ask yourself how you want to feel at that age. Where would you live, what sort of lifestyle would you have? There’s a spiritual element to all of this, in that I’d definitely want to become the sort of person who is at peace with myself and the universe, and who energises others and myself at every point of contact. I have imperfect elements of that now, but still suffer from bouts of not-quite-depression.

What do you want to have accomplished in 5 years time?

This question pulls the timeframe so very much closer. What are you going to do with your life in the not-so-far future? For me, this brought my thoughts to more practical matters, of what could be accomplished in five years that puts me closer to having the desired life. Five years is such a long time, and yet it slips away so easily.

I know that there are things that I’ve been thinking about doing for five years, and yet am no nearer to starting or finishing than when they first were conceived. For me this question gave rise to some concrete goals, stepping stones, reasonable milestones on the way to some of the answers in the first question. There were some outliers that weren’t related to my envisioned future life, and I’ll have to resolve those.

What would you do in the next six months, if that’s all you have left?

Wow. That’s pulling the timescales right in close. The chance to do something amazing against the odds. Satisfy long-standing desires and remove now-trivial barriers that may currently seem insurmountable.

Oddly for me I found very little to answer this one. I’m largely content, with no large goals to prove or set in motion before time runs out. For practical reasons I’d probably keep my job, because that’s where my life insurance is funded. I’d like to go live in Paris, because of happy times and favourite restaurants, but I know restaurants in London too. This was a very peaceful question, but I think that for most it wouldn’t be.

Next Steps — Gaining Focus

  • review each question’s answers
  • mark the most important three or so answers for each question
  • take the list of most important answers, and reduce it further
  • choose just three answers — and make them real

This may be enough for you - these final three things might well be the goals that will motivate you to take action. For me, it was interesting that the final three mirrored the results of another exercise I’d done some months ago.

No change in answers, and yet no tangible progress either. Maybe they aren’t sufficient in themselves to motivate me. Something must be wrong, so I resolved to figure out the reason I’d chosen the same things each time. Ask yourself why each item has ended up on your list. What is the true underlying reason that it is so important to you? Maybe the answer to ‘Why’ is closer to the answer you meant to give in the first place.

Rinse and Repeat

This isn’t the end, but only the beginning. I’m still answering the why question for myself. Awareness is the first step towards changing something, and I don’t yet know my purpose, only that where I am now isn’t right for me, and that the things I’ve been trying haven’t been working to change that.