Quilnmous

Several years ago, I thought this was going to my pet project and the direction I would take my career in. But since then, there are so many more interesting things that I would rather learn about, and then there is a whole other direction to steer my career towards.

So now, this is only an interest I would like to reconnect with, at some point in my life. But apparently I have to make room for the 43 most pressing goal ideas right now, and this is not one of them. So I am going to drop this goal for now. Someday, I shall return to it, but I’d like to work on other things right now.

When I listed this goal, I thought about famous people and I thought about fictional characters. At the time, none stood out in my mind, so that is why I hadn’t made an entry yet.

Tonight, I started thinking about taskmasters who are good at accomplishing their long term goals. And one name came immediately to mind: KashaBunny. Her ability to juggle different detailed tasks, as reported in her account here on 43 Things, is just amazing. She has wrapped up a major educational accomplishment as one phase of her life, while finishing off a whole slew of medium-term and other long-term goals.

I understand that this strength of hers sometimes gets to her, and leaves her feeling a bit uneasy with the void of planned business (pronounced “busy-ness”). But I see it as a great strength, and I admire her so much for how good she is at it.

I’m not sure how she does it. She will report that she has 10 things to do. Then the next day she is down to 8 things. Then the next day down to 7. And I’m thinking, that’s 3 months in my book of working to get things done, and she did it in 3 days. But I do know that she will take little life-breaks, to refresh herself for another session of achievements. And I get the sense that she is successful at finishing things by working hard, applying her will and determination, all the while maintaining a strong sense of direction toward her goal (kind of like a marathon runner must visualize in order to get to the finish line).

So I will use her as an inspiration to me, to accomplish my goals in life – short-, medium-, and long-term. And I sense that she will be cheering me on. Thanks, KashaBunny.

This is an entry I began under “strike a balance on my to do list” goal. I am continuing the train of thought to this goal now.

So in an effort to seek balance in the things I was doing on a day-to-day basis, I found that I needed to back off of using this site. (Yes, the many people who have listed “spend less time on the internet” and “spend less time being addicted to 43 Things” can relate to this.) So about five days ago, I decided to accomplish other things – I kept saying I will get to 43 Things later. And when bedtime rolled up, and just as I was about to log onto 43 Things (as well as accomplish a couple other tasks that would keep me up for another three hours), I had to remind myself that “less is more” (my current mantra and another goal listed here) and “just do it,” in my case, the Nike mantra for going to bed.

And then another day rolled around without 43 Things. And then another. And then another.

I had managed to accomplish a lot of tasks in that time. But now I was not being true to my goal. Once again, I had an imbalance – I was not allowing myself a little time to spend here on 43 Things, which is important to me.

And it is important to me not merely because I am trying to achieve 43 things (which is what several of those tasks I was otherwise accomplishing when I was not on this site had been about). It is important to me because I ended up depriving myself of cheering people on regularly, which is an activity, a task, that is a meaningful one to me.

So…I apologize to the uncheered, to those I owe cheers to, and to those who, because I’ve lost several potential cheers these past few days, will be uncheered for now. (Thus spawning the philosophical question: If a potential cheer is lost by not logging in to 43 Things, did that cheer ever really exist?)