Achieve

Reverb's Prompt-a-Day Blog Challenge  

December 28 – Achieve. What’s the thing you most want to achieve next year? How do you imagine you’ll feel when you get it? Free? Happy? Complete? Blissful? Write that feeling down. Then, brainstorm 10 things you can do, or 10 new thoughts you can think, in order to experience that feeling today. (Author: Tara [...]

I think that one of the reasons I have been so resistant to most of these Reverb10 prompts is that they are so "cookbook." I hate to say it, but they are a lot like the creative writing prompts I gave my 5th and 6th graders when I taught middle school. It's no wonder so many of my students just stared at their blank notebooks. So I'm rewriting this one, making it more like what I would give to my current writing groups. Open-ended.

Write from the word achieve...

I've achieved a lot of things in my life, many of which I intended. Sometimes I think that my life didn't start until I achieved retirement, and at that point, I thought I was through achieving. Through striving. I was wrong, of course. The next four years were some of the hardest and most fulfilling times of my life. I wouldn't trade them for anything, but I sure wouldn't want to relive them. Setting and reaching goals takes discipline and courage, but mostly discipline. It was hard for me to put my nose to the grindstone after retiring from 30 years of doing just that. But in order to reach my goal, that's just what I had to do. So now I claim to be through achieving, once and for all. And I'm wise enough to know that it doesn't work that way. I'm just in a holding pattern.

I prefer living with as little stress as possible, or with only the ordinary stresses of everyday living, and the occasional "bombs" that drop from time to time. For that reason, I tend to avoid the "achievement list," goal-setting, and the like. If I really want to do something, I do it. Never mind if it's hard or easy.

It seems to me that "accomplish" is an easier word to work with. As in, "What did you accomplish today, or this year?" "Achieve" seems weightier, makes me think of someone climbing up a very large, slippery triangle with the word "GOAL" balanced precariously on the top. Let someone else go that route. Not me.

I don't make a list of accomplishments, either. At the end of each day, I reach for my bedside journal and try to capture the day in at least 3 words. If I'm feeling poetic, it'll be three words, or a haiku of 17 syllables. If I'm uninspired, it'll be like one of those 3-line "Dear Diary" entries in a 5-year daily journal. On good days it's just something like "Laundry, crickets, the full moon."

So, what do I want to achieve next year? One thing for sure: to write at least 3 words in my bedside journal every night. Three words that sum up my day. Anything else is gravy.