Today it has been a proper Sunday. I didn’t have a real, settled and cozy Sunday in months. Probably half a year, if I really think about it. It was either loading up on more work, researching the move in another country, preparing for the move in another country, testing the move in another country or just adjusting to the move in another country. Either way, I hardly had a single Sunday unfolding like this one.
Proper run in the morning, then taking the time to plan the next week in detail, a bit of rest – like, you know, not doing anything “to relax”, just good ol’ rest – and then, in the evening, the reminder of the daily blog post.
As I was settling into this Sunday vibe, I started to think about all this turmoil. The last year and a half has been crazy. Not only for me, the life of the entire planet is upside down. What used to be normal eighteen months ago, now seems utterly remote, almost impossible to come back to, a distant and foggy fairy tale.
And yet, it was just eighteen months ago.
Under And Over Estimation Of Achievements
It is said that people tend to drastically over estimate what they can accomplish in a year (hence the (in)famous New Years Resolutions, which I ditched a while ago), but even more drastically under estimate what they can accomplish in ten years. And I deeply resonate with this.
I mean, during the last 5-6 years, I think I got a little better at estimating what I can achieve in a year. Even a black-swan event like the Covid-19 clusterfuck didn’t nudge me too much, I am more or less in line with whatever I wanted to do. One year is a comfortably predictable window for me now.
But the larger time frames, like 10 years, are still fascinating and, obviously, impossible to predict (at least for me). So much can happen in this time frame.
If I try to remember how I was ten years ago, it’s literally about somebody else. It’s not like I had a few very different traits back then, no, I truly feel like I was a different individual, a different person. Physically, mentally, emotionally, on all levels. Today, I have just a handful basic things in common with that person, and most of them are related to my official identity (I didn’t change my name, obviously), and a few previous long -term commitments that are still going on today. Everything else, vanished.
While the remaining of this proper Sunday is slowly vanishing away too, I’m trying to look forward, into the next ten years. And it’s very hard to create a plausible picture in my mind. Knowing how different I am from just ten years ago, projecting myself that much into the future is simply to much randomness. I honestly don’t know.
All I know, though, is that these last ten years have been incredible. Not necessarily great, because they were still some big blunders, but deeply transformational.
And it’s this potential, this capacity for transformation that has been proved in the last decade that makes me look forward with hope, and detachment, to the next ten years.
If history rhymes at all, at the end of the next decade, if I’m still around, I know I will be completely different from the person that I am right now.
Photo by Loyal Deighton on Unsplash
