The month of January is named for the Roman god Janus who had two heads, one looking forward, the other backward.
We need to look in both directions in life. If we want to get somewhere, we need to know where we are coming from and where we want to go.
Reviewing the past is important. We need to recognize and learn from the mistakes and the good decisions we made.
Pat yourself on the back for your successes and strengths. We tend to remember the failures more intensely than the successes, and then feel fatalistic or pessimistic, which is a quick way to sabotage success. Plan specific goals for the future. The smaller and more time-related a goal is, the easier it is to attain.
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Last year contained many exciting and scary things for me. I completed my first year of formal retirement, although I still keep active with my two columns a week and some part-time counseling. But I found that by not going to a job at 8 a.m. each morning, my sense of daily organization suffered. I got things done, but they didn’t seem to fall into place as well. The more my list of “to do’s” didn’t have to be done, the less likely they were actually done.
The most exciting event this year was the Saskatchewan Provincial Library’s interest in placing all my Western Producer and Daily Herald columns on its website. I spent endless hours scanning or retyping the 2,000 columns I had written since the late 1970s. They were on an old Apple IIC computer that could not be converted to modern systems. But the end result, hopefully soon, is that this material will be available globally to anyone who wants to access it via computer. I will soon let readers know the address of the website where the columns can be found.
The most scary thing this year was my surgery for prostate cancer. It gave me an opportunity to meet other men facing a similar challenge, either directly in support groups or across the world by e-mail. Despite anxiety about my future health that is bound to hang around for some years, my crisis helped me to live more in the here and now and enjoy the health and the life that I have.
I have some other challenges for the next year. I hope, with my son’s help, to set up a personal website. I may try counseling via e-mail or by long distance telephone. I plan to continue writing my columns and counseling part-time. I also plan to devote more time to physical fitness.
Another challenge, which is life-long, is to work at improving my roles as a husband and a father. I continue to find good books on this topic and hope to share these with readers in the coming year.
