Goal & Activity Log

The above image is a snippet of a spreadsheet I use to keep track of my progress on certain goals. The overall purpose is NOT to try and accomplish each goal every single day. Instead, it is an observation tool to see how much balance I'm creating in my life. Making a little bit of progress each day on a few goals is better than very sporadic or infrequent progress or no progress at all. Consciousness and awareness of one's actions is key. After a period of time the chart shows me if I have neglected any goals or if I have spent too much time on certain goals but not on others. A balanced life leads to fulfillment.

A summary explanation of the goals:

• Exercise - about 10 minutes of bicycle and then some strength training and back exercises.

• Holosync - my meditation program on audio CDs. Usually a half hour or hour long.

• Journal - keeping my handwritten diary up to date.

• Catholic Formation - this includes going to church, studying with a private tutor to become a Catholic, spiritual reading, learning, and prayer. There are some really great online study groups at CCEL.
  

• Big Mind or Shadow - these are practices from Integral Life Practice. You could say that the Big Mind meditation helps you experience god-consciousness. Shadow work (i.e. the 3-2-1 Process) involves dealing with difficult people, emotions, memories, situations, etc.

• ACIM Lesson - study of one of the daily workbook lessons from A Course in Miracles.

• Learning - listening to audio or viewing videos from the Integral web sites, Gnosis.org, Theosophical Society, Speaking of Faith, Eckhart Tolle with Oprah, LibriVox.org, and anything else I find interesting that adds to my knowledge. It helps to use my pocket MP3 player so I can listen and do chores at the same time. The Internet is really a treasure trove for learning!
  

• Write my book - progress towards writing my book on esoteric Christianity.

• Compose music - progress on writing about 20 minutes of music for a small string ensemble.

• Blog post - writing posts for my blog, like this one!

• Morse Code - now that I've got my ham license, I want to learn the code before I get on the air. I'm still mastering the alphabet.

• Special Projects - this relates to a list of various special chores around the house, such as organizing all my photographs into albums, cleaning out closets, redecorating, etc.

• Volunteering - time spent helping my condo association; and eventually I would like to volunteer at a nearby hospital.

• Friends & Family - hanging out with people.

• Dining out - not necessarily something I want to do too much, as it can get very expensive very fast. By monitoring my activity I can help to avoid excessive spending.

• Library, Park, Museum - free fun activities that get me out of the house. With 6 months off from a day job it could be easy for me to become a hermit at home. I have to watch that I make sure to get outdoors, enjoy the weather, and socialize.

Mindfulness

The older I get, the more I find that my level of mindfulness determines my level of happiness. I would also include related qualities, such as having clearly defined goals, self-discipline, mental clarity and concentration. Without mindfulness (i.e. the awareness of one's own thoughts, feelings, and actions), the mind can just wander off all over the place, skipping from one association to the next, one fear or memory after another, a tendency that Buddhists vividly refer to as "monkey mind". Without mindfulness you can feel as if your life is passing you by, as if you have no control and time is being "stolen" out from under you. And everything starts with the mind first - if the mind is a mess, then the feelings and actions that result will also be a mess (and vice versa).

When I was a teenager and had unlimited free time during summer vacations, I found that if occupied myself with working on my goals and interests that time would just fly by very joyfully. My mind would be so wrapped up in accomplishing goals or learning something new that I didn't wander off into other thoughts or concerns. My mind kicked into gear and focused on one thing and that was the happiest time of all. Such experiences are often described as being in a state of "flow".

But why is it so hard to maintain mindfulness? Without self-discipline to put mindfulness into practice, one can fall into a lesser passive state - sitting for hours watching TV, browsing the Internet, playing video games, drinking alcohol, etc. After wallowing in the passive state you can end up feeling like you didn't accomplish anything. The time flew by with little or no benefit and you might as well have been asleep! Now, this is not to say that mindless leisure and relaxation do not have a valuable purpose. I am all in favor of a little daydreaming or mindless fun activities once in a while to recharge my energy level. The problem comes when you realize that copious amounts of time escaped into nothingness! Weeks, months, years!

Here are a couple of nice quotes from Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

To control attention means to control experience, and therefore the quality of life. Information reaches consciousness only when we attend to it. Attention acts as a filter between outside events and our experience of them. How much stress we experience depends more on how well we control attention, than on what happens to us. The effect of physical pain, of a monetary loss, of a social snub depends on how much attention we pay to it, how much room we allow for it in consciousness. The more psychic energy we invest in a painful event, the more real it becomes, and the more entropy it introduces in consciousness.

And this:

The only way to take over the ownership of life is by learning to direct psychic energy in line with our own intentions.

And this fits in well with another life-changing book I love, The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. A quote from the very first chapter:

If you want to be successful, you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life. This includes the level of your achievements, the results you produce, the quality of your relationships, the state of your health, and physical fitness, your income, your debts, your feelings - everything!

One part of my daily mindfulness practice now includes a spreadsheet in which I monitor the status of my current goals. Every day I check off whether or not I spent some time working towards each goal. This has really helped me tremendously to see where my time has been going! In the past I would create "to-do" lists or schedules, which invariably always seemed to fail. I would not do what I told myself to do, leading to guilty feelings and further procrastination; a vicious feedback loop of failure. But this is different! It is simple self-observation of one's actions and use of time. If you can simply observe yourself, without judgment, you can see what you have been doing with your time and then make adjustments or changes as you go along. It helps to create balance in your use of time, which in turn helps to facilitate the "flow" experience, leading to a higher quality of experiencing life itself.

Tomorrow I will share with you a screen shot of my spreadsheet chart and goals.

Gratitude of Former Paid Employment

Today was the last day of the “day job” and it still doesn’t seem real. Maybe because it has been yet another week of sleep deprivation, making me feel like a zombie (a lamentable condition of unreality). It feels like I have been going to the day job, day after day after day, since forever. Hard to believe that when Monday morning comes along I will not have to get up before the crack of dawn, jump on a bus, hike many a block of Minneapolis skyway to fill a chair in a cube farm, and stare, glassy-eyed, at a computer monitor for 9 hours straight. Now I have the leisure to stay at home and stare at my own monitor for as many hours, days, and weeks on end as I can tolerate (hopefully NOT – I am getting tired being chained to computers! Especially with the tantalizing edge of summer emblazoning the sky with warmth and electrifying the grass in hues of vivid green!).

I am so grateful to have met my coworkers. Lots of really excellent people, and the best supervisor anyone could possibly ever imagine. I feel a twinge of regret that even after spending about a year and a half with these people that there always remained a few fascinating characters that I never really got to know at all; and even the ones I thought I knew, still left me wondering how much more was hidden in their hearts that I would never know. Our lives intersected these many months and now I am moving on to other things; and, in turn, each one of them will be moving on and inhabiting their own realities as well, going about living their individual lives, intersecting with other people in an infinite web of connections. It is so true that you don’t realize what you have until you’ve lost it. Now that I contemplate this latest turning point in my life, I feel immense gratitude that my life intersected with all of these beautiful, genuine people. I hope I can keep in touch with them in the future, or at least keep them in my thoughts and prayers from time to time, wondering where they are, what they are doing. Bless them all!

If only life were long enough and deep enough that we could know other human beings in more authentic ways, in their souls. How many times do we pass by our co-workers, people with whom we spend an enormous portion of our waking life, making idle chat that only touches the surface of lived experience, when each person holds within himself or herself an unfathomable world of consciousness, memories, perceptions, and potential greatness? It is impossible for any of us to know what it is like to be another person, to be inside their eyes and minds and perceive the outer and inner worlds from their unique viewpoint, as well as vice versa. When I think about this, I am awestruck by the immensity of life! Each human being a self-contained universe, known only unto itself! Such a wonder!

I passed the test

A shiny new copy of a Morse code key, similar to one used by my great-grandfather as a telegraph operator for Western Union. This is the famous Vibroplex "bug".

I took the exam for the Technician class license of Amateur radio this morning. I passed it! In about 15 days I should be able to find out my callsign from an FCC website. This is so exciting! I've been thinking about joining Ham Radio since I was a kid. Getting a callsign will be like getting a new name or identity.

It was a little awkward (and funny) for me at the testing site. I was the only female in a room full of about 30 or 40 middle-aged white guys, and probably one of the few under the age of 40. Once we were allowed to begin our tests, I zipped through mine in about 2 or 3 minutes at most, raised my hand, and had my test graded and reviewed by the examiners. One examiner made a humorous glance at another, bugging his eyes out, and then later giving me the thumbs up signal that I had passed. I was the first to finish my test. I didn't stick around to see how long the others took. Taking a zillion practice tests on this site made a big difference, but I already knew most of it just from playing with shortwave radios over the years. Plus the Technician exam is super easy anyway.

Now my next goal is to master the code this summer and save up for a key, antenna, and HF rig by the end of the year. The Vibroplex bugs look cool, and would certainly be nostalgic for me to connect with my great-grandfather, but I'm thinking an iambic key would be easier to use. These keys look pretty spiffy and are expertly-crafted works of art.