My best friend came to visit last weekend and she reminded me that we never write our goals anymore. This is something we used to do at the end of every year; we’d sit down and write three to five goals each for the year, a mixture of personal and professional goals, and usually there would be one or two shared “adventure” goals, like “we’re going to climb such-and-such mountain.” In fact, I remember one year we wrote our goals on New Year’s Day in the lobby of the Dik Dik hotel in Tanzania, just after coming down from the summit of Kilimanjaro.
We don’t do it anymore. Pam said something a few years ago about how we never accomplished all our goals and maybe there were too many of them. Is that why we quit doing it? I can’t remember.
We had a moment of energy this weekend when Pam said, “If I have a goal this year, it has to have something to do with finding a new passion. Something new to be truly engaged with.” And that’s what I’ve been thinking too; it’s what I was talking about when I wrote Single white female seeking a new tribe recently. Pam reminded me that it doesn’t start with finding the tribe; it starts with finding the thing the tribe is passionate about, and making it your passion. Then the tribe grows around the engagement in whatever that thing is.
So Pam threw out an idea she was thinking about, to explore the world of yoga at a retreat in western Massachusetts she’d been looking at. I had been thinking, similarly, about going to a fit woman retreat in Vermont. I think the thing we’re both looking for is a place to network with other women and get inspired by new ideas. Our friend Claudia was with us and she was interested too, so we looked at Pam’s yoga retreat and we looked at my fitness retreat and the bottom line is that we couldn’t find a weekend or a week that would work for all of us to go.
That’s the trouble with finding a new thing to be passionate about. If you’re not really passionate about anything yet, but you’re just looking to try new things, you end up not putting in the necessary effort to make it happen, to make it fit in a busy schedule.
Maybe we’ll try again next year.
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