Nobody teaches you ‘life-planning’. It’s not on the national curriculum, slotted in between P.E and maths, which means I’ve spent the best part of the last thirty years sort of bobbing along in life. For the most part it’s been fun but I’ve often felt that life would flow better if I had a map of where I was heading and why, and develop a clearer idea of what exactly I wanted to do.
I’ve never set down life goals more significant than a ‘to do’ list of daily chores scribbled on some scrappy bit of paper or some unrealistic NewYear’s resolutions that quickly got swept away in the general messiness of living life. The idea of taking a full ‘day out’ from life and just taking stock of where I am and where I’m going both intrigued and intimidated me. Yet it was perfect timing. I was back in London after a year of traveling in South America. I’d turned 30 that year, while traveling by canoe and sleeping in a hammock in the Peruvian Amazon. I’d fallen in love and now, back in my familiar patch of London, I had a strong urge to return to South America. This time to live.
A ‘Planning retreat’ sounded exactly what the doctor ordered. I left London at some ungodly hour of the morning, laden with a bag of old diaries, notebooks, those scrappy ‘to do’ lists and other ‘life’ ideas that Curtis and Steve had told me to bring along.
The retreat day took place in a grand, wood-panelled reading room of a country hotel in Sussex which had plenty of open space around it for walking, and talking. There were just three of us on the retreat, of different ages and in three very different careers, yet all looking a little apprehensive. After the initial introductions and some discussions about where we were in our lives and what had brought us here, we were asked to imagine being in a helicopter, looking down on our own life.
Steve led us through the visualisation exercise, explaining that most of us live our lives very focused on the immediate demands of day-to- day living, the current tasks we have to complete at work, what we have to do for next week. But, if we want to plan, set important life goals and get the most from the time we have left, we would have to view our lives from higher up, as though ́hovering ́ at high altitude in a helicopter.
Starting at the lower altitude, we wrote down the current projects we were working on, our interests and responsibilities. As a freelance writer, I often have lots of different stories on the go at the same time, ideas of stories I want to write ‘some time, maybe’.
Just getting them all out of my head and onto paper, without any attempts at organising them, proved a relief.
I ended up with a page of spider diagrams with a different key interest at the centre of each. I started a list of articles I was working on or wanted to pitch and some of the volunteer groups I wanted to get involved in while in London.
As we increased altitude, we began considering broader ‘life areas’ – from work and career to our more creative interests and personal growth/spirituality – and how our daily tasks fitted into each. Both Steve and Curtis emphasised the importance of not just planning a career path but planning for everything we wanted to do in life, whether that was thinking about when we would have children or getting a creative personal project off the ground.
Particularly useful for me was completing a 12-month review. We took last year’s diary and listed everything we had done, writing each important milestone or significant activity under each of our key life areas. I’ve kept diaries for years but always just used them to keep track of my work tasks and social life for the week ahead, leaving them to gather dust once the year was out.
Using one to review the year gone by helped me see exactly how I was spending my time. While I always felt I didn’t make enough time for friends, the review found there had been plenty of nights spent with the people closest to me, over a glass of wine or dinner.
It helped me see what was out of balance and which life areas I was neglecting.
We were all scribbling furiously, writing down what we were doing under each of our key life areas. We then looked at our personal values and ethics. What made us tick? What was important to us? I realised how important the environment and nature had become to me, how I wanted to live more sustainably and focus my writing on green issues. Writing down those personal values has helped me since in deciding which work projects I should take on.
The day was broken up with walks through the grounds of the hotel, through green fields and trees. I got chatting to Steve about one of my vague ideas for what I could do for work if I moved to Colombia. He immediately got behind my idea for setting up a network of freelance journalists in Latin America – something I’d not talked about with anyone else – and started asking me questions about how I’d get it started and what I needed to do next. He made me realise that I’d not set aside sufficient time to think and plan for a future in South America.
After a good walk, I returned to my initial areas of focus and added a new spider diagram: ‘Project Latin America’. Eventually, we were hovering high enough to visualise a bird’s eye view of our whole life. We then mapped this as our ‘100 year life’ on graph paper, plotting in key milestones that had happened in our past, from finishing school and university to our various jobs and significant relationships.
Then we got onto plotting the future. It was surprisingly easier than I thought. I realised I’d imagined a lot of my future and what it would look like but had never talked about those images or written them down. I was self-conscious about putting them down on paper at first – imagining how the tentative new relationship I’d started with a Colombian I’d met while traveling would pan out, how long I might stay in Colombia or Latin America, my long-held dream of returning to India one day and studying yoga. Yet I got bolder as the afternoon went on and, by evening, I was still writing feverishly, putting reminder notes into my diary of what I needed to do over the next three months to set the wheels in motion on the various projects I’d identified.
By the end of the day, there was plenty of planning left but, as I headed back on the train to London, I felt a sense of achievement – and relief – for at least making a start.
Since the planning day, I’ve been able to view the future with more confidence and clarity. I’ve set a date for returning to Colombia and now have defined projects that I am working on while I am here in London.
And, every couple of weeks, I open my diary to find a ‘nudge’ – a little handwritten note scribbled to myself in the midst of that life planning day, telling me what I should be doing this week if I want to keep on track. And it takes me right back into that helicopter, where I can view my life in full all over again.
Emma See – Retreater – 2010
