“The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.”
Author G.K. Chesterton’s words are like a gauntlet thrown down before the complacent and the comfortable. Not satisfied with espousing simple goals like shedding a few pounds or organizing closets, Chesterton suggests that the New Year is nothing less than an opportunity to remake oneself.
Often we start the year by setting career-related goals in our quest to improve our work situation. Setting specific career goals is useful, but often our thinking is so constrained by habit that we miss seeing the larger arena of possibilities where we are actually playing out the game of life. What if we expand our definition of what is possible and consider more freely what a new challenge or goal might look like?
Taking on a new challenge is a way of kick-starting the process of life - a dynamic process that can sometimes get bogged down by a safe, routine sameness. A new challenge is essentially about trying new things, learning new things, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world.
When you commit to doing something you’ve never done before, new doors tend to open up. Even if the new challenge isn’t directly related to your current career, an openness to trying something new can lead to surprising opportunities through the workings of that mysterious process called life. The challenge doesn’t have to be one that everyone else would agree is big and important. The key is that it appeals to you for some reason that perhaps you can’t even articulate. It’s the kind of thing you might sheepishly confess to a close friend: “I have no idea why, but I’ve always wanted to _____.” Or it might be a fairly spontaneous challenge, such as a spur-of-the-moment trip.
A few years ago, for no particular reason that I could identify, I decided to holiday in San Francisco by myself. This felt like a challenge because I’d only been to the United States a few times, I’m not an especially well-travelled person, and I was on a ridiculously tight budget.
While there, I happened to meet someone who a few months later offered me a job that allowed me to work from home, which allowed me to live anywhere I wanted, which allowed me to move to Powell River, and which connected me with a new colleague with whom I later embarked on a book project... which will lead who knows where. Seeing as how authoring a book has been one of my life’s dreams, the initial decision to challenge myself by travelling to a new city turned out to be very fortunate indeed.
Having difficulty accessing a desire for challenge in your life? Here’s a short list of new challenges just to stir things up:
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