Lovely morning. We are exactly halfway through 2021. Did you set any goals at the beginning of this year? It must have been very difficult to find your goals at the beginning of the year, with the unprecedented spread of the virus around the world and the lack of visibility.
Even if you haven’t achieved your goals yet, if you are taking steps towards them now, you should give yourself a lot of credit for that. Take some time out to look at what you’ve done so far and reconsider the path you’ve taken to achieve your goals.
The last six months of hard work will have given you a lot of problems and challenges. And when things that you thought would go better don’t turn out the way you want them to, it’s crucial to consider why. Just looking back and lamenting about the past is not the way to move forward. We cannot go back to the past like in the movies, we cannot change the past.
What we can do is to learn from the past and use what we have learnt to find a new way forward and move towards the future we dream of. If you feel stuck, it’s good to explore a different path. Seeing things from a different perspective can help you discover new things and find your own style through trial and error. And if you feel that you’ve entered a period of sluggishness in your learning process, it’s because you’ve been doing one thing for so long that you’re ready to take the leap to the next level.
Once you’ve set your goals again, it’s time to set smaller goals along the way. You should be proud of yourself for being able to do and understand more than you did before, and treasure the feeling of joy as you move on to the next step. I believe that we are not given things, but we pursue what we want to explore and we find joy in grasping it.
It is up to you to make your own small daily choices, and with each step you will find yourself setting, pursuing, grasping and learning to reach your goals and the depth of your life. Your progress may have seemed slight and there may have been days when you felt like crying that you were going backwards, but when you look back on the past, you will see that you are clearly different from the person you were six months ago and you will feel proud of yourself. Here’s hoping that we can continue to build on the wonderful and hopeful future that each of us has created for ourselves.