Dreams, Process and Goals

With the new year, come what most people call "resolutions". Annual cycles of any sort (no matter which calendar or landmarks you're using), offers an opportunity to reflect, re-assess our values, and set goals for bettering ourselves and the world around us. I've been a long-time believer that doing what you love every day, dedicating even a small amount of time each day to the things that really count - will bring success and a sense of accomplishment in an otherwise pretty chaotic and stressful world. I'm pretty happy with the daily routine I've established over the years so you won't see me signing up for any special classes at the gym just in January or opting for some crazy fad diet. I like to keep my life balanced and healthy year around. And I believe, that unless I'm traveling, I'm doing a pretty good job. This routine (a very boring name for something that I find quite magical and crucial for my own happiness) seems to keep my life balanced, which is not an easy feat being a one-woman-show in every area in my life (for those who are late comers to this blog - my business is a one woman show, and so is my household, where I am the only responsible adult caring for my teenage daughter who's experiencing a rather jolly autistic life).

So instead of resolutions, I've decided to set very specific goals for this year. And perhaps, with the peer pressure I'm putting on myself announcing it to the world on this blog (well, I know not ALL of the world is reading it!). One of them is finishing and publishing my book .
The other goals are traveling to fun places, besides visiting my family in Israel. For the first time ever in my life I'm actually feeling wanderlust. And for that, I will have to save a little fortune, especially since I'll be traveling with my daughter most of the time... So first I will have to work even harder than I ever have, and then we shall see...

Process is one of the most fascinating thing. Processing information. Creative process. They're all so personal, whimsical, and irrational. But in the end - once everything is completed - it all makes sense. And the process has such a huge impact on what the end "product" or "conclusion" as well.

Being a task-oriented person, I have a tendency to get swallowed and consumed by certain projects. It's not so much that I am focused on the end result, as much as I just get very carried away with completing each aspect of the project. And it's not that I don't enjoy the process. It's just that it becomes very much of a physically painful non-stop thing. Be it writing a mass email (something that takes me one day of work at best - and more realistically, 2-3 working days, to put together all the content, photographs and programming). Database updates are just as worst, and so is filing my taxes. Once I sit down to do it - I will very unlikely leave my seat till the job is done. Which is why I often procrastinate the getting started part...

I'm trying to change my ways this year so it doesn't hurt so much... And the first step is think about it differently. What if the task wasn't finishing up the whole book about at least 100 essential oils that I'm working on? How about - my task is to dedicate an hour each day for writing about one. It will only take 100 days to get through them, and won't hurt nearly as much. And 100 days is just a little over three months. Not bad at all.

I've done a similar thing last year when I had to transition from one method of measurement to another in my formulas. It meant needing to weight out and record each formula again, at least twice. Lord, was it tedious. I was not looking forward to it. But how I went about it was that I did it with formulas that I needed to mix up a new batch for anyway. And I'm almost done with that - I've got only about half a dozen perfumes left that require this attention. And I actually quite enjoyed it - learning a lot in the process.

I hope that with this new approach of mine, of just taking one day at a time, and breaking down my tasks (so that my task-oriented personality stays happy and feels accomplishments every day, instead of frustrations about not being able to write about 100 oils all in one day). This is quite a mammoth project, and it was in the making for quite sometime. It really deserves to materialize into more than just a few notes here and there for several of the raw materials I work with. I really want to give each one of them a nice little chapter. In a lot of ways, each materials is a chapter in my own life - so there is more to it for me than just analyzing their scents and looking up information in reference books. It's creative in more ways than I can tell you right now. You will just have to read for yourself once the book is ready!