Category: Ramblings

A few years back I stopped, for the most part, making New Year Resolutions, opting instead for Yearly Goals. Resolutions seem altogether too non-specific: exercise more, live healthier, or whatever. Goals, on the other hand, are concrete. A well-chosen Goal is a stretch to reach. The ideal Goal is just out of reach and can help you achieve your best, even as you fall short of the Goal. Whereas, easily kept resolutions are pointless and unfulfilled resolutions result in disappointment.

Over the years, I’ve come to realize that some of my Goals were not well chosen.

Some Goals pertained to the Quantity of something when the Quality of that thing was what mattered. Reading Goals, are examples of that. A Goal of reading Augustine’s City of God in a certain span of time is missing the point. The point of reading something like that is not to check something off a list, but rather to absorb it and have it make an impact on your life.

Other Goals were too non-specific. They were resolutions, really. For 2023 one Goal was to “get rid of all those things that clutter my life.”

Some of my Goals were worthwhile, even though I did not attain them or, perhaps because I did not attain them. They kept me focused, if only for a time. They led me forward.

Here, then, are my 2025 Goals:

Run 500 miles. That still works out to 42 miles per month or 10 miles per week. Each of these past three years I have only logged about 400 miles. That comes out to about eight miles per week. The difference between eight miles per week and ten miles per week really boils down to setting aside the time. One thing that helps is that I feel better when I do follow through. Better physically and better emotionally.

Learn some basic yoga by the beginning of July, enough so that I can practice some form of the discipline on my own for a half hour on most days. Since I know next to nothing about yoga, I will need to figure out “what kind” and “how” fairly soon. I do not expect to practice it every day but it can, perhaps, serve as a complement to running for me.

Learn more Italian. I started working on translating Dove mi trovo. I will finish translating that book, for starters. I have also started translating parts of La Lunga Rotta (The Long Way) by Bernard Moitessier. I will finish translating the section of the Appendix to that book that I started. I still need to refine this Goal to make it more concrete.

Attend a dozen live performances: concerts, plays, operas, poetry slams, whatever. Live performances can have a dramatic effect on me. At least the right ones do.

Write 1000 words per week.

Achieve a Goal for Sailing: Become proficient sailing in Gentle Breezes and Moderate Breezes, that is, Force 3 and 4 in the Beaufort Scale. I already feel comfortable sailing in those 7-10 and 11-16 knot winds, respectively, but I am not proficient. I would not be able to reliably teach someone else to sail in those conditions, the easiest ones to sail. It will take much more experience this year to achieve that. Additionally, I want to gain at least some experience in sailing in Fresh Breezes (17-21 knot winds) to the point where I can perform each function, helming and tending the various sheets, albeit with the guidance of someone more experienced. Plus, I want to be able to reliably keep under way in a Light Breeze, that is, Force 2, or 4-6 knot winds.

Remain injury free for the year. Last year I smashed my had with a six-pound hammer while splitting wood and took a tumble while trail running through the woods. The first of those injuries really curtailed my activity through a chunk of the year. The second injury was less disruptive but did not help. My Goal is to be more careful and not hurt myself.

I reserve the right to update, expand, or refine these Goals as the year moves on.

N.B. This year I have no Reading Goal. The reason for this is twofold. Firstly, this year I want to Read Less, Do More. By that I mean I want to be mindful to not use reading as a proxy for doing, living vicariously by reading about other people pursuing their dreams. Secondly, I want to measure my reading by the quality of what I read and the influence it has on the life I live, rather than measure it by the number of books or pages I read. So, I will continue to read, just more judiciously.

I like old dogs. I like old things in general, old people, old houses, old boats, but especially old dogs. They have a comfortable ease to them and they’ve attained a certain gentleness. They take life patiently and they find some enjoyment in each and every day.

With our first three dogs (our fourth one is still only weeks old) I became more in tune with each one over time, and they, I think, with me. They were fine as puppies, cute and playful, but as each one aged my appreciation for him grew.

Rusty was the most gentle dog I have ever seen. He acted a bit like an old dog from the moment we brought him home from the shelter in Virginia. He had been sick for some time and had bad joins from the get-go. Although he recovered somewhat, he was never a rambunctious young dog. But he enjoyed life at his own tempo and was a very content, self-sufficient, stay-at-home dog. He seemed to rely more on my care as he became frail at the end and maybe that helped us become a bit closer. I was sad to see him go and I miss him.

Ryan, while not the most gentle dog, was the best pal in the history of pals. As Rusty’s health deteriorated, Ryan provided him with companionship on Rusty’s terms and at Rusty’s pace. After Rusty died, Ryan’s goal was to become friends with every dog, every person, and every animal in the whole world. Mr. Leisure, particularly during the last couple years of his life, grew more and more fond of long, slow, pleasant walks with me. By the end, I swear he’d have walked me to Miami if I let him. I was sad to see him go and I miss him.

Robert, although only three years old now, is starting to flow along the same path. Over the months our tempos have more closely aligned. Now, with the arrival of the puppy, Rob has sought me out even more, at times. I’m his safe, secure home port during the storm. I’m also the one who fills the void when the puppy steals everyone’s attention with his clumsiness and his antics.

Puppies are cute, but cute doesn’t last forever and when the cuteness fades, I’ll be there.

First the 2023 Review

See here for the post of my 2023 Goals.

Run 500 miles: Fell short of the goal. Only ran 400 miles.

Become fluent enough in Italian to read a couple chapters of an Italo Calvino novel: Fell short of this one, too. Did become marginally more fluent in Italian. Rather than a pair of Calvino chapters, I translated the first two chapters of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Dove mi trovo. Much shorter chapters.

Read Saint Augustine of Hippo: Read two of the three books I intended to read, On Free Choice of Will and Confessions. Did not start City of God. No apologies, here, though. Pored over Confessions. Was worth the slow, thorough read.

Sail: Made it out on the water so seldom it was disappointing. Made it back to shore every time, though.

Visit Hawaii: Budget and schedule did not allow me this one. Did visit Milan, Italy and the French Riviera for ten days with Marie, though. That trip was wonderful.

Feed the hungry: Opened up the wallet for this one, which was a half-measure, as far as I am concerned. Volunteering my time in addition to my money would have been much better.

Reduce: Reduced in every way imaginable, it seemed. Still, the mountain of clutter continues to cast its shadow on my life.

Well, then, I fell short of every goal. Better than achieving every goal, I suppose. I mean, if I had achieved every goal then I did not aim high enough, right?

On to the 2024 Preview

OK. Going to recycle a 21/22/23 goal. Run 500 miles. Ten miles a week.

Travel appears on my list again this year. Instead of Hawaii, though, it will be New Zealand. Mary and Marie went there at the beginning of 2020, just before the real start of the pandemic. They have been raving about it ever since. I have already set aside money for the trip, inherited from Marianne. She would approve.

Read Augustine’s City of God, at least some of it. It is long and dense and requires quite a bit of thought and reflection. So, my idea is to read as much of it at the pace I can to absorb as much of it as reasonable this year. It is composed of twenty-two books. Maybe I will read one a month, roughly. Perhaps more, perhaps less. Also plan to read the Letters of Saint Paul, all of them.

Write a chapter (or short story) a week.

Learn to sail well enough to attain at least one certification.

Finish translating Dove mi trovo. And then what? Some chapters of Calvino?

Do something unplanned, unexpected, something that I will treasure for the rest of my days.

Live the skux life.

Here are my Goals for this year, in no particular order, with some brief thoughts on each.

As I did last year, I am re-recycling one of my 2021/2022 goals, which was to run 500 miles. That’s still 42 miles a month or 10 miles a week. When will I run this week’s 10 miles? That is the question to ask myself each week. The year will take care of itself.

One thing I very much want to improve upon is my Italian language skills. I really love the language and want to enjoy speaking and listening to it. To help move me along in that, I am going to learn at least one new verb each week. Learn the verb and use it a lot to make is stick within me. Additionally, I plan to be able to read at least the first two chapters of Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno, un viaggiatore.

I plan to write at least one thousand words a week. The only impediment to me doing this is me setting aside the time to do it. Once I actually sit down and start, the thousand words materialize without much effort. It all comes down to setting aside the time.

I want to read, really read and understand, three writings by Saint Augustine of Hippo. The first of these three is one I have already started, On Free Choice of Will. I also plan to read Confessions and City of God. Augustine’s style of writing, at least in On Free Choice of Will, takes some getting used to. He must be the patron saint of double-negatives. But if I slow down and read carefully, he is much easier to follow. It is well worth the effort.

Now that I have my boat and have sailed it a few times, I plan to put it in the water sooner in the water this year than last year and sail it more. Also, my plan is to acquire the first three ASA certifications, 101, 103, and 104, this year. Learning to sail well does require some study, but it also requires actual time sailing. I will do both.

Another goal, or plan, really, is for Mary and me to visit Hawaii. This is something we planned to do a couple of times in the past and both times our plans were scuttled. This time we’re going.

I also want to volunteer in some capacity to feed the hungry on a regular basis. The few times I have helped out in this way felt really good, really worthwhile uses of my time. I want to do more and do it regularly, make it a part of my life.

This last Goal or Plan is to Reduce. Reduce paperwork, reduce the clothes in my closet, reduce the tools and other accumulated things in my garage and basement, get rid of all those things that clutter my life. As they say, “Property is Slavery.” Losing these shackles will give me the time and the space to actually follow through on all my other Goals. I guess that makes this Goal a Synergy. Whatever. I’m ready.

Disappointment.

That is how I would describe my 2022. Disappointment. Primarily with myself.

I didn’t do anything. I didn’t change. I did not grow as a person in any apparent way.

And it’s not that appearances are the point, here. Inner essence is the point. But an essential change in someone really should become outwardly apparent.

I had no change within myself for others to see.

A waste of a year.

It was not a lack of goals that was my problem. I had goals. Attaining, or at least pursuing, those goals should have occasioned some type of real improvement within me. But it didn’t.

I simply must do a better job with 2023 than I did with 2022.

First, a review of last year’s goals.

• Run 500 miles: At 400 miles, I fell well short of my goal. But I learned a thing or two by it. First, you don’t run 500 miles; you run one mile 500 times. Or five miles one hundred times. Or four miles a hundred twenty five times. Or whatever. Need to make those one hundred or two hundred or however many runs happen. Each one. Individually.
• Read Classics: Read enough to form an idea of what was going on with those ancient Greeks and why they influenced Western thought so much, for better and for worse.
• Master beginning Italian: I picked up a bit, but not nearly as much as I wanted to. One has to be able to do more than count up to twenty and ask about the train for Naples. I have gotten somewhat past that, but not far.
• Buy a sailboat: Done. “Four O’Clock” is mine, now, although her name will change. Have not decided what her name will be, though. She’s a twelve foot cat boat a “Beetle-Cat” from Wareham, Massachusetts. Needs to have her keel repainted, which I will do this winter.
• Learn to sail her: Only managed to get her in the water once. This spring I will sail her much more and take some course or another in sailing.
• Submit a book for publishing: Didn’t even come close to finish writing it. Probably should have made the goal to finish writing it, instead.
• Povitica for all my siblings: Done. Even got some useful feedback from Rudy. Dough needs to be thinner. Something to work on.

I blamed 2020 on the pandemic. 2021 was my own doing.

So, what are my goals for 2022? How do I plan to achieve them?

Let’s start off by recycling one of my 2021 goals, run 500 miles. If I really learned something by falling short of that mark in 2021, then I’ll have to put that lesson to use this year. It’s not 500 miles a year, it’s 42 miles a month, 10 miles a week. When will I run this week’s 10 miles? That is the question to ask myself each week. The year will take care of itself.

Reading, even classics, is a pleasure for me, something I do as a matter of course, and probably should not qualify as a goal. So this year, classics or any other type of reading is off my list of goals.

While I did manage to pick up some Italian, attaining some fluency in the language remains one of my unattained goals. By the end of this year I aim to be able to carry on at least a simple conversation in Italian.

Sailing was another area where I set out a goal that was unmet, largely because it was poorly defined. “Learn to sail” is too vague of a goal to measure for success or failure. Attainment of some certification in sailing is much more definite and included in this year’s goals.

Finish that novel AND submit it for publishing.

For my final goal I am going to choose something that might appear to be too vague, as other goals have been too vague, but this one really is not. When I look back on my life thus far, some of the remembrances that bring me the most satisfaction and happiness are the ones where I did something unplanned, spontaneous. This year I want to do one thing that I have not planned and, perhaps, have not yet even imagined. It needs to be something that will, when I look back on it ten years hence will leave me with that same sense of gladness that I did it as I have with some of the other things in my life. Big enough to look back on a decade or more later and something I did not expect at the outset of the year, which is now.

Now is when I start.

Some years back, while rummaging through a drawer, I came across a collar from our old dog, Rusty. When Ryan, our golden retriever, who was by my side, saw the collar in my hand, he nosed at it, curiously at first, then aggressively. Ryan’s tail started to wag furiously and he became quite animated, paws dancing. I took off Ryan’s collar, a leather one which had become tattered and smelly over time, and put Rusty’s collar on him.

He wagged his tail some more.

Rusty was a rescue. A golden retriever perhaps mixed with something else, Rusty was sick when we brought him home. Bad joints from Lyme’s disease and underweight, he was basically an old dog from the get-go, even though he was quite young. He lived his entire life with us slowly plodding along. There was no rushing Rusty.

Ryan, on the other hand, was a typical eight week old puppy when he joined the family one December. Clumsy, rambunctious, and affectionate, he chewed, as puppies chew, on everything, including Rusty a few times. Rusty quickly let him know that was not appreciated, but that did not seem to stop him or even slow him down. More than once, Rusty looked up at me with a look that seemed to be an exasperated plea for help.

Our walks around the neighborhood were often a source of amusement for the neighbors. I usually walked both dogs together. Ryan would have one leash stretched out in front of me and Rusty would have the other stretched out behind, pulling him along by the neck. Ryan was always trying to pick up the pace. Rusty was always trying not to catch up.

As Ryan approached his first birthday, he showed no signs of slowing down.

Rusty, on the other hand, became sick and started to turn frail at that point. Lumps scattered around his body pointed to the reason for his decline. His appetite left him and he wasted away incredibly quickly. He got to the point where he could not walk or really even stand. I carried him outside a few times a day in the crisp October days to pee and poop and take in a bit of fresh air. Other than that, he just rested in his bed.

For Rusty’s last day the weather turned warm and sunny, a cloudless eighty degrees with a very slight breeze.

I scooped up Rusty and took him to the edge of the shade of his favorite tree in our back yard, a towering maple. As I laid Rusty on the grass, Ryan quickly scampered about, gathering his toys and some sticks and his rock collection. An indiscriminate chewer, Ryan was fond of chewing on rocks and we were always careful to never let him have any stones small enough to swallow. Somehow, though, he managed to accumulate or find a bunch of rocks, some as big as his head. I was not even sure how he carried them.

What he did with all these toys and sticks and rocks was to array them in an arc about six feet from Rusty, all in front of Rusty where he could see them. From the house I watched on. Ryan would chew on one of the toys or sticks and rocks and then, every few minutes, would bounce over to Rusty and touch his nose to Rusty’s. Rusty would wag his tail and Ryan would chew on something else for a few minutes and then touch Rusty’s nose. All the while, Rusty watched on, lying on his belly with his head between his front paws.

He seemed to enjoy the show.

This went on for a couple of hours, it seemed. Then it was time to bring them in.

That night, Rusty seemed unsettled so I stayed up with him in the living room. Ryan slept off and on there on the floor with us. After waking from a couple of dreams, Rusty went back to sleep and just a bit past three in the morning, breathed one last quiet sigh.

After the sun rose, it was time to take Rusty away. They gave me his collar to take home. It went in the drawer.

Ryan, of course, searched the house for his big buddy that morning but didn’t find him. It quickly became apparent that Ryan’s world had been tumbled. He spent the day confused. By that night, he stopped looking for Rusty.

The next day started still, quiet. First thing in the morning when I let Ryan out into the back yard, he immediately trotted to the middle of the lawn and peed, as usual. Then he found a large flat rock near the house and sat on it. He lifted his snout to the sky and for about a half minute Ryan let out a pitiful howl, something he had never done before. He sighed, looked briefly at the ground and then came to the back door to be let in. Inside, he found his bed and laid down.

This routine went on every morning for a couple of months.

He missed his big pal.

Eventually, though, Ryan settled into being The Only Dog. And that’s how things continued.

Until years later when I rummaged through that drawer and came across Rusty’s collar.

Ryan is an old dog now. He has slowed down and a lot of people remark on how well behaved he is. He does have his moments, though, when he doesn’t listen. But I cut him a bit of slack on those occasions because of what he did for Rusty at the end.

As I have said, and wrote, everything important in life is personal.

Justice is personal. There are two forms of justice. Proportional, or distributive, justice is the notion of receiving what one deserves or what one is worth. Think of equal pay for equal work. Absolute justice, or corrective justice, holds that an injustice against someone is an injustice, regardless of the victim.

George Floyd and his family received some measure of justice today. What Derek Chauvin did to George Floyd was a severe injustice and today it was publicly recognized as such. Many people will try to put this into a larger context and try to make some inference about what this means for society, but at the bottom of it, Derek Chauvin was held publicly and personally accountable for the death of George Floyd.

Justice was served.

That has not always been the case.