Ever on & on

I’m not one for resolutions. To me, they often felt too rigid, prescriptive. Or maybe that was the perfectionist who understood goals as all or nothing, not only in the what but the how.

I do, though, pick a word or theme for the year. I think I first picked up the idea from a post by Cate Houston (I could go back in the archives & confirm, but I’m trying to get this written & practicing letting little things go sometimes).

Reflecting on 2023’s word

Unusually, I didn’t write about my word last year. I did pick one, but it never made it to the blog. It didn’t even make it on a post-it by my desk. So when my husband asked me what my word was last year, it took me a while to resurrect.

Space.

2023 was meant to be a year to carve out space. To not fill my days with more. To commit to shaping spaces, physical & temporal, to better support my life.

We had just moved into a new home, same city but a place that we own pay the bank (rather than a landlord) for each month. We wanted to create a comfortable living space. We did.

I ran a lot of races in 2022, and Gene was training for Ironman. We’ve been talking for years about mountain adventures we wanted to go on, but training and events limited the time. In 2023, we committed to keeping space in our schedules for those outings, and we had some incredible days in the mountains together and with friends.

At work, I stepped back from a few things that were not really serving what I needed to focus on. It was fortuitous I suppose, as personal and professional events placed more demands on my time. The space I created was rapidly filled, then over filled. Whole it was a successful year in many regards, I didn’t succeed at holding that space.

2024: A year for systems

This year, I’m doing something unusual. I’m taking a word someone else set for their year.

Well, that’s not quite right. It’s something I kept finding my focus drawn to over the past many months, especially as work got busier and some things were sliding far down the priority list. Systems also kept coming up in my reading, listening, and conversations. I just hadn’t found the single word I was looking for until seeing Ryan Holiday’s post last week.

2024 is a year of preparation. Next year, I will be managing a large project at work—the sort that keeps our institute running, or not. This year, we are undertaking planning work, essential to the project.

But that’s not the only preparation I need. I know from prior and ongoing experience that other work doesn’t stop just because we have this big thing going. There’s still the day to day. There are still new shiny objects that can be hard to ignore. There are still the unplanned changes that throw things out of balance.

This is where systems come in. The truth is, in many cases, I have systems—but they’re not always explicitly articulated or working optimally. How do we make decisions about which projects to start or stop? I have guidelines, but they’re mostly in my head. How do we make information about complex processes, in particular the “institutional knowledge”, more accessible? I know shared notes and process documents will improve our recall and reduce reliance on individual memories, yet that’s the work that’s easily forgotten when we get busy or just tired.

Whether they’re working well or not, whether they are operating as intended or not… Systems are embedded and shape our behaviors. If we want them to work for us, to improve our lives, we have to build/borrow/use them with intention.

This is my time to do that.

You have these people in your life who are always OK.

Nothing seems to ever truly throw them off. Shit happens, as it does to all who walk through life—but for them, it looks like just another step on their path. Perhaps a little wobble but soon enough they’re on their way. They don’t complain. They keep moving. If you ask offhandedly, they’ll answer automatically, “I’m fine.”

And sometimes we are fine. There’s nothing of note to report. We’re dealing with the things, and we’re making our way through.

But sometimes, our silence isn’t a sign of sanguinity in the face of challenge. Sometimes it’s the sign of quiet struggle in solitude.

Why not speak up though?

Because we’re the ones who are always OK. It’s what’s expected of us—by family, friends, self.

Perhaps we’re trying to convince ourselves that we really are OK, this is fine, we’re fine, everything is fine. Sometimes that’s what we need to continue forward.

Or perhaps, whether from imagination or experience, we feel/fear that you don’t know how to react to us not being OK. Will you brush it off? “Oh it’s not that bad. You’ll be fine, you always are.” Or will you view it a radical and disconcerting twist? “You’re always fine! This is completely out of character. You need to manage this.”

Check in on your friends who are always OK. Listen to their silence as much as their words. Because sometimes, like everyone else in this world, we’re not fine. And know we’re not alone when we’re not OK can make the way ahead seem a little lighter.

I felt this tweet from Charlyn Partridge deep in my gut:

Measuring up performances is an unavoidable and often odd thing among humans. Largely it comes down to what we’ve set as the benchmark.

When we’re assessing our own performance, I think many (maybe most) of us fall into one of two traps.

Option 1: We compare ourselves to others while stripping away all context.

Option 2: We compare ourselves to an impossibly flawless ideal self.

In the first, we see what others are accomplishing. How do they do it?! Why can’t I keep up? I’m just not as good as they are. We think this without considering differences in experience, skills, interests, access, and whatever else is (not) going on in their lives and ours.

I think of an author sharing the experience of being interviewed by another writer who expressed her envy of the author’s success. The author, noting that she had been at it a decade longer than the other writer, told her she hadn’t earned the right to envy. Now, I generally think that people have the right to feel whatever they feel (though not to do with that feeling whatever one wants). But it does crystallize the idea that much of what we envy, much of what we compare to, isn’t a difference in ‘natural talent’ but in time and experience (and yes, networks and privilege play roles too).

In the second, we know what the perfect version of ourselves would do under idealized circumstances if everything were to go perfectly to plan. This ignores the reality of our messy lives and messy world. In chemistry, we would do a lot of calculations assuming ‘standard temperature and pressure’—0 degrees Celsius, 1 atmosphere of pressure. But we understood it’s an approximation. Lab settings, even when pristine, are rarely perfect. We might do work to optimize reactions, but often we just needed good enough. And everyone knew at least one story of the reaction or protein crystallization or other lab protocol that only worked at a certain time of the day or year.

So how is it that others come away with such incredibly different assessments? They’re looking at the results and outcomes of our performance. They may or may not know what the intended results were. But they (usually) hold us to such impossibly high standards of process or contextless production. They have the advantage of more objective comparison and focus on what we’re accomplishing—with less interest in whether we took “the way” to get there.

There are times when how we do things does matter (e.g., getting an experiment done but in accordance the appropriate regulatory approvals). But often when we’re judging our work, we overindex on process. Sometimes we need to step outside ourselves and consider what we’re comparing our performance to.