Hello, and welcome to my weekly advice column where readers ask me questions about anything and I tell them what to do. If you need advice, write toiamtedwilson@gmail.com or leave me a voicemail at (617) 379-2576.
Happy New Year, friends! This week I’m answering the one question on everyone’s mind: Oh no, I just wasted an entire year!
Technically this isn’t a question, just the anxiety we all feel as we watch time slip away with nothing to show for it. Each year we promise to make changes to prevent this from happening again and rarely are those promises fulfilled.
Of my 80+ years, I would say fewer than 10 of them don’t feel like a wash. The first six were just a lot of sleeping and running and screaming. After that there was some bike riding and a lot of school. When I became an adult I spent most of my time working at an insurance company; the only respite being the eight month sabbatical I took hoping to build the world’s largest elastic band ball. Once it was done I discovered several other people had built larger ones years before me. I returned to work a failure.
Happiness is all about managing expectations. For instance, I really wanted an Xbox for Christmas, so when all I got was a framed picture of my nephew I was pretty disappointed. If my wish had been an unframed photo of a pile of rocks I would have been really happy to get that picture of my nephew. Especially because I could use the frame for a better photo. He’s rather unphotogenic, but a nice kid.
It’s unrealistic to expect not to waste a lot of time. In fact, you should expect to waste most of your time on Earth. Be grateful for the things you get to do and don’t panic about the things you wanted to do. You can’t do everything because there's too much of it.
If you’re like me, you probably don’t even remember most of your life. That’s why I create a visual log of memories. The more stuff I accumulate, the more it seems like I’ve been going places and doing things. Each object represents a memory of something I’ve done. The broken lamp sitting in the corner of my kitchen reminds me of the time I found a broken lamp. The TVs in my garage remind me of all the interesting people I met when buying TVs at tag sales. None of those people remained friends but those are experiences I’ll have forever.
Taking notes is a good way to remember the things you’ve done that aren’t represented by physical objects. For instance, I helped a blind man and his dog cross the street and wanted to add that to my list of memories but he wouldn’t let me take any souvenirs (even though I easily could have). So I wrote a haiku about him. It goes:
his eyes stopped working
my eyes are so much better
no cars drove over his legs
I put this haiku into my book of haiku memories. One poem per accomplishment. I can easily flip through and read beautiful poems about all the things I’ve done.
There may be things you don’t want to remember. Don’t take souvenirs (especially if they could be evidence) or write haikus about them. And most of all just don’t worry so much. For all the time you’re going to waste, do you really want to waste it worrying?