Blowing Bubbles in 2008

After deciding yesterday that upsizing will be my motto this year, I started wondering how this could help me forward in delivering results in priority areas of my life. And I realized that if there is anything I both loved and hated last year, it was my to-do list.

Like the saying goes about women, that men can neither live with them nor without them, the same applies to me and my to-do list. I love to have a place to jot down what to do, and I do so enthusiastically all through my waking hours. What happens after the jotting down is another story altogether. Once a good idea has landed on my to-do list, it seems prone to certain death. I find it so hard to transform these written exhortations back to life, to the real-time action that I needed to be reminded of in the first place!

What is in my head is chaos and I like it that way, the sheer creativity of it. I never stop to be amazed how many good ideas I can catch and cook in a day, particularly in the early morning. How to combine all that left-brain creativity and liveliness with some right-brain common sense about prioritizing and delivering? How to capture the ideas but not kill them in the process, and nurture them to live forward in a more organized space where important and feasible ideas are filtered and prioritized? A few months I wrote Work is Art on top of my to-do list, but even that didn’t bring the actions to life as I wished it would.

Then it hit me, that what I was looking for might be something like the bubbles I blew when I was a child, those temporary, fragile, living, moving, beautiful and transparent globules that I loved to see grow and rise until they popped! And some never did, they simply floated out of my sight. Could it be that some of the priority initiatives of my to-do list and life plan did not grow as I had wished because I hadn’t blown enough love and life into them? Could I revive the boy in me to blow bubbles, to see them grow, and to achieve more of my dreams that way in 2008?

I took this bull by the horns, and set to work. I decided that my written life plan for the new year would not look like the one for last year after all, and neither would my to-do list. If I couldn’t live without it, and I knew I could not, at least I could transform it into something much more alive. Et voilá, after half an hour, I had filled a blank page in MS Word with a collection of bubbles of various shapes, colors, and sizes (I quickly encountered my limits of experience in using clip art to create more forms of bubbles). The title…. Blowing Bubbles in 2008!

Another half hour passed and I had empty bubbles for my current priority areas in life, all on one page. Some were central to my life, like “my times for spirit, soul, and body”, “my times with loved ones”, “my music practice” (Paulo Coelho’s The Witch of Portobello reminded me once again how important music is to tease more life out of me) and, of course, “my money.” Other bubbles were created for important priorities in my personal life, and in my work life. This morning, I started using this new approach, and captured ideas into these bubbles, to be loved and nurtured to action there.

And I was surprised by the obvious when I found out that a positive side effect of using bubbles was that they have limits to what they can accommodate. Where to-do lists just kept expanding, the boundaries of the bubbles on the paper kept me focused on writing a few priorities into each one. Too much would weigh them down too, I reflected. And rather than having to scan up and down a to-do list, I looked at my bubbles, and realized that unless I loved them enough to blow life into each of them, the actions written there might surely wither and die. And if any bubble was found to be leaking, I would need to blow harder!

For a moment, I wondered if labeling each bubble “my this” and “my that” wasn’t being overly ego-centric. And then I realized it had to be that way. My priorities were only going to be achieved if I cared about them enough, and blew enough life and energy into them, so that, like real-life bubbles, they could bring me pleasure and dissolve in their own good time. If I wouldn’t care enough, the bubbles would have no meaning at all.

What a nice discovery, that blowing bubbles had a lot to do with making my new year resolutions and giving them life to succeed.

Photograph: Place to enjoy bubbles: a bath tub in the Maya Ubud resort hotel, Bali.