Most people are familiar with the concept of a Catch 22 – even those who haven’t read the novel by Heller know that it’s a somewhat absurdist law, literally catching you out, forcing you to do something you don’t want to and/or refrain from doing something that you do want, no matter what.

Life can be a little like that; who hasn’t felt trapped in a job or a relationship because you didn’t see a way out? Regular readers know that I like the idea of achieving, of experiencing, of expanding and improving. Or maybe it’s the opposite that scares me; stagnation, resignation, wasting what little time we have. Either way, I often feel that I don’t do enough, and I think that many might feel the same. There is a bit of Catch 22 in this, too; you don’t do anything to pursue your dreams, because pursuing them risks exposing them for what you fear they are: dreams.

But: big dreams stay dreams because you don’t divide them up into manageable chunks. You want to circumnavigate the world, but you don’t because it’s too difficult a thing to plan and execute. You want to get rich, but you have no idea how, so you don’t even try. You want to sing like Adele and write songs like Ed Sheeran, but since you probably can’t you don’t even sit down at the piano.

However, break it down into smaller pieces, and suddenly it’s feasible. I have a colleague who is traveling the world one country at a time, and he makes it look easy; he went to Machu Picchu over a long weekend, he did Australia (the civilized corner) in a week. Granted, it’s costly to travel like that, but what I take away from it is that you can see a lot more if you do many little trips than if you sit around dreaming about going on an extended world-cruising, continent-hopping holiday that somehow never materializes. I don’t think I want to go to South America for three days (I fear the jet lag alone would turn it into a mescaline trip), but the principle is sound.

The same goes for anything, really. Take finances: I never really had a plan for money beyond avoiding going into red, but I’m slowly starting to change that. And it’s the same thing there: you can’t turn into a finance wiz overnight, but you can read up on, and invest in, a LOT of things that over time will (hopefully) net you substantially more money than if you just leave whatever is left at the end of the month in a savings account.

As for healthy living, again, no one can expect instant fitness – it takes more than one gym session to get ripped, alas, and more than one healthy meal to live forever, cruel and unjust as that is – but if you set a weekly goal of not eating anything unhealthy except on Sundays, say, and working out a little (20 minutes, the length of a sitcom) every day, then it doesn’t seem quite so impossible to attain.

It IS important to be accountable to someone tho, as this increases the likelihood you’ll go through with your ambitions. So, here are my goals and how to reach them in -22:

– I will do a minimum of one trip per month to places I’ve never been – city weekends, short hiking hols, bonsai road trips, what have you,

– I will try to double my savings over one year. I have a figure in mind, but even if I don’t reach that I will actively try to improve my knowledge in this field,

– I will get fit – defined as 80kg body weight or less, and/or fat percentage of 18, and use the above mentioned template as my starting point,

– I will read at least 20 non-fiction books, or a little less than one every two weeks, on top of the Blinkist ones I’m already reading, and report them to my fellow jolly readers,

– I will learn a new piece of piano music every month, for a total of twelve.

I have other ambitions too, like more paragliding, bee keeping, sauna building, gardening, chicken keeping, et cetera, but these are easily visualised, and easy to quantify and report back on, thus keeping me (hopefully) on the straight and narrow.

Here’s to seizing the day, and making 2022 a good catch!