Ending the 101

In other goal-related news, I decided last night that I’m ending my 101 in 1001 (which should go until November 9, 2009).

Why?

When I started the 101 in Febuary 2007, I was in something of a life funk. I’d been doing the same basic thing for almost a year — same job, same apartment, same social life. It was good as far as it went, but something wasn’t quite working. I figured I’d give myself a motivation to try new things, as well as do some things I knew needed doing, and see if I could figure out what was missing or not working.

Almost two years later, I did figure out what wasn’t working, and my life is drastically different, but mostly because of things I decided to do that were only tangentially related to the 101. I don’t regret setting it up, because it did push me into a mode where I was trying new things, and therefore trying other, different new things was possible. And I did do some neat and needed things — I’m particularly proud of completing goal #25, which was to visit 10 Bay Area regional parks; I started it in March of that year with Sam McDonald County Park and finished this fall with Purissima Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve (that’s one new park roughly every two months!). I started contributing to my 401k, volunteered for Bike to Work Day and other SVBC activities, baked birthday treats for work, visited some great places, found a dentist and a doctor, and made pizza on my own.

But many of the remaining goals are more in the spirit of “things I think would be good/interesting to do” than “things I really want to do”, like the transit daytrips and reading lists, while other things I’ve done are things I would have put on the 101 if only I’d known at the time: Waves to Wine, blueberry pie, jigsaw puzzles.

The list will continue to be a great source of future activities for me when I’m looking for something new. But I don’t want to be comprehensively guided by it; I want to be more focused on the things I see as really key and really rewarding. So I’m taking it off the table — for now.

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