I’ve decided to initiate a 30-day self-improvement process. I’m limiting this process to 30 days because I supposes you can do _anything_ for 30 days. Assuming the worst – that the self-improvement exercise will be as unpleasant as you can imagine – it’s only a month. Even the most horrible of personal circumstances, if time-delimited, can be treated as nothing more than a temporary delusion.

And self-improvement? The motivations here are threefold.

First, and least meta, to actually _make progress_ on some of the areas that I’ve felt I’ve been stymied in during the last couple months.

Second, in full avoidance-thinking, to avoid any bleak feelings of future regret when I will have wished I had made earlier, decisive improvements in my health, my diet, my career, my personal relationships, my hobbies, etc. I had a situation recently where I came away thinking “if only I’d kept on top of ‘X‘, the situation would have worked out more favorably.” Don’t want to repeat that again if I can avoid it.

Third, to invite an immediate change in my current thinking. Up until very recently, the last few months has been occupied in the care and feeding of a certain pseudo-obsession (defined as: obsession without teeth), which has taken time and mental energy in spades; opening up my focus to allow actual Things That Matter For The Long Term to take priority seems, well, very positive.

This is fundamentally an optimistic approach. Coming at this thing from such an angle, I suppose I should write something homiletic and perfunctory, as in “Isn’t Life Grand?” and expect it to ring true.

It doesn’t.

As every skydiver knows, there’s both a map, and a territory. The map is labeled “self-improvement”, which invites optimism; however, the territory – the actual area the map points to – is labeled “real life”, which has, for every positive possibility, a reciprocal, negative, possibility. And everything has bound up in it both the possibility for good outcomes, and not-so-good outcomes. We chafe at this. We like to identify Good Things and segregate them neatly away from Bad Things and simplify. Yet things are not just either or or; maddeningly, they can be both. This is our problem – we expect to be able to box things in, to give them a single definition, to sand off all the sharp corners, eliminate the complexities, to be able to pay at best half-attention to many of the things happening around us, reassured that nothing scary or unthinkable is going to whiz by unexpectedly and put our eye out.

This is a lesson I’ve learned this year – that sometimes, in the pursuit of Good Things, you have to lead with your chin, risk putting your eye out, and avoid sitting on your hands. Take risks. Stretch. Open yourself up to the possibility of negative returns. There’s no such thing as a risk-free life; just a life that is or is not fully lived.

So, with this new self-improvement plan, even though I come at it optimistically, I allow for – but do not wallow in – the possibility of failure, disappointment, etc. Call it a realist approach, or a cynical approach, or what have you – but of late, it’s the approach I’ve conditioned myself to take. I’ll lead with my chin, but have sense enough to keep my eyes open and my wits about me.

Coincidentally, you might be wondering what are the components of this new self-improvement plan? Well, I’m not telling – the quiet heron gets the fish, after all. I’d like to keep the elements private, and work on them in my own way and cheer or moan as necessary on my own. For now, anyway.