Bryan’s Ramblings

Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur always bring about extremely reflective and emotional thoughts inside my busy little head. It of course makes me want to become a better person and improve myself in whatever way(s) that I can. This usually includes promising myself that I will start going to the gym, start eating right, stop staying up late, stop procrastinating, and all that perpetual “New Year’s resolution” bullshit. Every year I hope that at some point I am able to meet those very meaningful and self-fulfilling goals. Of course, every year I fail miserably to do so…hence the reason for setting them every year.

Still, I’ve set them again for myself this year, and hopefully with something more of a plan than usual. I have a larger goal in mind this time; it’s a much broader target. I will reduce stress over the next year. I’m putting myself on a stress-reducing plan that includes all of the usual methods: more relaxation time, more vacation, and of course less work. As anyone can usually tell you but not actually do, the way to accomplish this is with more efficient time management. It’s the age old problem, and usually the root cause of all my headaches and problems in my life.

I never have trouble coming up with excuses to not work on something or to not do something or to not go somewhere or whatever. What I have a harder time coming up with is what the heck I’m doing that’s so damn important while I’m avoiding these other things (excluding, of course, the writing of this blog). I’m talking about laundry, bills, exercise, job work, school work, house work, and all that stuff. Sure, these things seem mundane and oftentimes they are, but if enough mundane things pile up, eventually you’ll have no clothes, have bad credit, be out of shape and have more work to do than time to do it. My life is rapidly approaching this state, and it’s a scary place to be.

Thankfully, the High Holy Days are here, and it’s time for me to carpe diem and do something to avoid having to live in an unnecessarily stressful existence. So during these Days of Atonement, I am working on devising a detailed plan to get me stress free and 100% happy once again. It’s a sort of phased approach (thank you corporate America…) that slowly works in all the aspects of a stress free life.

Time management just means scheduling and planning and getting into a [good] routine…all things that I have always been so poor at doing. Usually I fail to achieve these goals because I try to change them all at once, but I can take baby steps over the next few months to make progress. Unfortunately, I need to dig myself out of the hole I’ve dug thus far…which means being on overdrive for the next couple of weeks and plowing through it full force with little to no free time.

My new favorite phrase is “I made my bed, so I have to lie in it.” It’s so easy to blame others for the problems you create. This stops now for me. I will face the music each time it plays loudly in my ear. I have no one to blame but my lazy, procrastinating self. It worked so well in school, but it just doesn’t work in real life. A wise puppet once said “I wish I could go back to college.”

So I know what you’re thinking. “This guy is all talk.” Yes, that’s definitely been true for me in the past. All I can say is that I hope it’s not the case this time. I feel like I have more of a handle on things now with the High Holy Days here right in the middle of crunch time for me. I’ve always claimed that I’m not a pessimist, just a pragmatist. As I’m getting older, though, I’m feeling more and more negative, which just isn’t me. So I think I’m going to have to try to switch to being a perpetual optimist just to offset the many negative things that pragmatism (i.e. real life) exposes.

I’ll say this much for my life right now: it’s never boring. I have so much going on that if I don’t implement this High Holy Days induced stress-reducing project as soon as possible, I very well may hit a brick wall and never be able to recover. I can’t let that happen.