The examined life is no picnic. – Robert Fulghum
Sometimes it’s sunny, sometimes it rains. Life, I believe, is still a picnic either way.
What does that mean?
This gem is from his book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kinder-garten and is the payoff line for a paragraph long discussion about the difficulties of doing things and making decisions. In short, he was describing his difficulty of always having either too much or two little information when making a decision.
That can be a problem if you are over analytical about it. However, I still believe examining our lives is the better path than strictly random movements through life. While uncertainty and randomness have their place in our lives (wanted or not), I find a little order to be beneficial as well.
Without knowing what you have done, how can you figure out where you are going? I prefer to design my life, rather than to simply allow it to become simply whatever happened to me. Yes, the examined life is no picnic, but I consider it to be better than living an un-examined life.
Why is self-examination important?
No, this isn’t a post about self administered medical tests, although they have their place in our lives. I consider the the examination of what we do and why we do it to be a critical part of understanding ourselves, our motivations, and our future trajectory.
We will continue to get what we get if we continue to do what we do. How often do you consider what is going on in your life? How often do you take the time to figure out why something you thought should work failed to work out the way you wanted?
These are some of the questions of self examination. There are deeper ones, but we must start somewhere, and these are as good a place as any. I’m a bit Anal-Retentive (yes, both words are capitalized and the hyphen is appropriate, thank you very much), so I try to spend some time at the end of each week to examine what happened the prior week.
I spend time considering what should have happened and why it did not. In this manner, I hope to get an idea where I might have lost track of what was important, or done something that might have been less than brilliant. In this manner, I hope to make small improvements every week, to help me manage my life, instead of the other way around.
Where can I apply this in my life?
As I described in the prior section, I like to look at what went right and wrong in the prior week at the end of each week. It gives me some feedback on how things are going in my life, and where things might need a little tweak here or there.
I start my week on a Monday, so I do my reviews on a Sunday afternoon or evening. This planned reflection period allows me to examine my life in miniature. While I cannot see year scale trends, I can see month scale trends by reviewing my notes from prior weeks.
This examination of my life helps keep me focused. One of the things I have designed into my personal planner (printed from a spread sheet, how sophisticated!) is a spot to write down what I need to focus on for the next week. You could use a whiteboard, a note on the fridge, or a note taped to the edge of your monitor to do the same thing.
What is more important to me is that you are taking the time to look at what is happening in your life. The next step is important as well. That you take that information and determining what you want to do with your life, and then doing it.
Digging deep can be scary, but the rewards can be massive, as a single issue can be responsible for many difficulties in your life. Fixing one can make a massive difference in your life. Try to have the courage to dig deep. To me, that’s what having an examined life is all about.
To me, there is little more important than examining (and hopefully designing) your life. At least I hope you’re doing something useful with the information you gather from your examinations. Designing your life, planning what you want to do, and working towards that goal, that is the foundation for everything else you do in your life.
Been unlucky in love? Have you asked why? Have you found any of the root causes? Or are you stumbling from relationship to relationship, never getting what you want? I found that by examining my failed relationships, I could find a couple of my more glaring flaws and do something about them.
By examining my life, and fixing the things I saw as flaws, my entire life improved. And that was just in one aspect of my life. I’ve been doing this for over a decade, and still am finding things that are in need of improvement.
To me, this refinement of self is kind of like doing stone sculpture, I’ve knocked off the corners, and have a general shape. Now it’s just a matter of refining what remains until I am happy with the result, may I live that long.
The paragraph from which the quote comes ends with the following statement: “I realized then that I already know most of what’s necessary to live a meaningful life–that it isn’t all that complicated. I know it. And have known it for a long, long time. Living it–well, that’s another matter, yes?”
Yes, yes it is. But that’s what makes life fun, in my opinion. Trying to match my doing with my knowing. I often fall short, but that too, is part of life.
From: Twitter, @positivityblog
confirmed at : http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/r/robertfulg131519.html
Photo by theogeo
Happy Birthday to Robert Fulghum, born 4 June, 1937.
