Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?

I don’t know. Yes. No. Maybe.

I don’t know: A year ago I was not sure where I wanted my life to take me. I was all over the place. I didn’t know if I wanted a new job or wanted to go freelance or just wanted to take a break and not think about anything or wanted something of my own.

There can’t be an answer if there is no question and so I did not know how my life would be a year from then.

Now, I do know where I see myself a year from now and so, I am going to work hard to get there.

Yes. Even if I didn’t know where I wanted to be professionally, I did know that I wanted to be healthier, happier, calmer, and better. I wanted to meet my friends more often, I wanted to eat out, I wanted to travel and I wanted to be content.

So, I pictured a life where I was working out regularly, I was meditating, my thyroid was under control, I was meeting friends, going out, eating my heart out and travelling. AND I am living that life 💃🏽

No. I pictured a lot of my problems would just go away. Vanish in the thin air. No anxiety, no mood swings, no breaking down and no setbacks. That kind of did not happen. But it wasn’t as bad as it used to be. I did better than last year or the year before or the year before that.

Repairing the damage caused because of years and years of suffering without healing takes a lot many years of practice and hard work. There is no fixed destination in this journey, it is a process.

Maybe. I was looking for something to do with this life, with my talents, my understanding of things and my dedication towards healing. And I think I found my answer in JOMO.

That brings me to our main topic:

How do you evaluate the days, weeks, months and years?

Days are long, years are short.

Days. Some 7-8 years ago I used to rate my day out of 10. 1 being bad and 10 being great. But I realised that out of 24 hours if I suffered from even a 10-20-30 minutes of inconvenience or just one bad thing happened my rating would go under 5. But if something good happened it did not go to 10. And on the days when good and bad both happened it still remained around 5-6. It’s hard to rate your day, you see.

Most of us can’t give high ratings to our days because we are afraid to find out that we are actually doing good…because if things ARE going great then chances are they will go downhill from here. The fear of something bad might happen if we acknowledge that the NOW is good makes us subconsciously think that now is okay-ish.

Weeks. Most of us don’t even look back at the week to evaluate it. That’s not a thing because it is too short for evaluation or too long to think of the first day of the week. Most of us let our weeks be.

If you keep some sort of journal, you can evaluate your week based on your entries. So, even if you are not into elaborate journaling I believe in writing one line a day. Or take one picture or a short video everyday. Or post something on snapchat or BeReal to look back at.

This is helpful in evaluating your week.

If a week isn’t that great, there are 3 more in the month and 51 more in the year.

Months. If you do your Instagram monthly photo dump or a second a day video, you would more or less know how your month was. If not, then you will have to sit and think about it and you WILL need some data to help yourself.

• What did you work on?
• What did you eat?
• What shows/movies did you watch?
• How many books did you read?
• Did you workout enough?
• Are there any changes that you feel physically, mentally, emotionally?
• Did you learn something new?
• Did your body get enough rest?

These are some of the questions you need to answer to know how was your month.

Years. Evaluating years is a grand thing. But overall, if you have your monthly evaluations, you will have your yearly evaluation too.

Recently, someone shared a very simple promtp on Openvy:

Even though this question is about “year”, my first thought was from moments in October, November, December (Even though I got married this year in June). That’s recency bias. And that is something that happens a lot when evaluating the year.

The only way to stop that from happening is to evaluate monthly, quarterly and then yearly 🙂

I know life is not about evaluations but knowing where you were, where you are and where you are going helps. It helps you grow as a person, it helps you evolve, it helps you learn new things and aim higher. It is good for your overall wellbeing.

So, what about you? Is your life today what you pictured a year ago?