Hello everyone! It’s my birthday!!!! Today, I thought I’d introduce my year 30 goal, which is to seek to create peace in my life for this upcoming year.

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Now, normally I do a X Things I’ve Learned by X with X being however many years I’m celebrating. However, after several consecutive years of doing this format, I realized I was just repeating the same things over and over again and had sort of lost interest in doing that again. Instead, I think I’ll do a 30 things for my 30s bucket list and post that later this BirthMay. So to replace that birthday post idea though, I decided to share my yearly goal today!

I had also had the idea to do a massive shopping haul for my 30th because, well, it’s my 30th! But then that completely goes against the whole budgeting and fiscally responsible mindset I’ve worked so hard to achieve and every time I found something that I thought about buying I found myself thinking “I don’t even want that, much less need that”. So I literally haven’t even bought myself any gifts. New year, literally new me!

Oh! If you’re new here (newer than May 2020) you might be wondering, what’s BirthMay? Well, every year I blog every day in May because it is my birth month. I just figured it was something fun to do, and it has proven to be really enjoyable for me. This will be the fifth BirthMay on my blog! No matter how many BirthMays you’ve been through with me, thank you for being here this BirthMay and thank you for your support!

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My Year 30 Goal: Create Peace

I am so grateful to be celebrating my 30th birthday. I mentioned last year in a post that my 20s were just so chaotic and crazy! Well, honestly I think they were pretty tame, comparatively, but so many cool adventures happened to me in the past decade that I do think of them as being pretty wild years. Plus, I think our 20s are just naturally chaotic. We’re adjusting to the world and realizing what we want out of life, and making strides to achieve our dreams. I had so many highs and so many lows and I’m grateful for everything I’ve learned from both.

Yesterday, I shared my reflection on my year 29 goal, and then ended by saying I didn’t know what my new goal was going to be. I had a pretty good idea of what I thought it would be back in March or April, and I think I even shared that I already had my goal pretty much set in stone. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it just wasn’t the right goal.

So I sat down to write out everything that I wanted for the next year. I just thought of the kind of energy I felt that my 30th year required and I wrote down a page full of ideas. I figured I’d get the ideas onto paper and that I’d seek out the most common themes to come up with the perfect goal.

It was much harder than I thought it would be! Nothing seemed quite right. There were so many words that I loved and instantly gravitated towards, but I realized that they didn’t quite hit the mark. For some, I felt they were too broad. Others were too limiting. Others were too passive while others were too active. Some were too colloquial and others were awkward. I could go on and on but long story short they just didn’t feel right.

You might remember that I went through a major Gilmore Girls watching spree earlier this year. If you’re a fan of the show, do you remember that episode where Lorelei’s old Jeep finally broke down and she went car shopping? She infuriated Luke because she was sitting in the cars and she kept admitting the cars were fine but they didn’t feel right. I was totally both Lorelei and Luke during this goal setting exercise. Part of me was saying “these are all GREAT goals! PICK ONE ALREADY” but the other half of me was saying “they’re fine but they’re not right”.

I wish I could take you through every step that it took to reach my new goal but I’ll skip all that and spare you the headache. Instead I’ll just explain why I chose “Create Peace”.

I chose the word “create” because it gave me a sense of ownership. Remember how I said some words were too passive and some too active? I felt that “create” was the perfect balance of the two. It put the ownership on the world to give me an opportunity to create and the ownership on me to actually do something.

Then, I chose the word “peace”. This is a little more abstract so I’ll do my best to explain. Recently, I came across a binder from my undergraduate days. The binder accompanied me through a week long leadership retreat back in 2010. I found that my focus that week had been on creating and fostering peace in the world. I guess that really resonated with me because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Another reason was that I was greatly inspired by the show Madam Secretary, which focuses on Elizabeth, the Secretary of State in the show, striving to create peace through diplomacy. Now, I’m not saying that my goal this year is to create world peace, but I think that those two things really brought to light how important the concept of peace has always been to me. On a smaller scale though, I’ve been talking a lot about slow living. I gravitate towards it because I want to bring a more peaceful and thoughtful energy into my life. I think a combination of all of these things really drove me to recognize that peace is deeply important to me and I view it as an encompassing concept for many of my goals.

So my goal is to create peace in my life in terms of my decisions, daily routines, adventures, and creative endeavors. Some concrete examples of how I intend to create peace in my life include:

• Creating a peaceful home – whether I end up in Texas, stay in Illinois, or end up somewhere else entirely, I want to focus on continuing to find a way to bring slow living concepts into my home to achieve peace and tranquility.
• Creating a peaceful state of mind – ah, this is easier said than done but it can be done! At least, I’m fairly certain it can. I want to live this next year with no regrets. I want to focus on kindness and positivity. And I want to be mindful of my own well-being.
• Creating peace in my work life – like many people I know, I gave way too much of myself to my job prior to the pandemic. It created so much stress, and when the toxic people at the office started to gain too much influence on my life it effected me strongly. I want to be hyper aware of this and not take myself or my new job that seriously as it’s not something that defines me in the grand scheme of things. (Unless you’re my future employer, in which case I’m totally joking lol.)
• Seek out influencers of peace – this one might sound weird, mostly because I used the word “influencer”. But I do want to try to focus on educating myself on peace advocates, both big and small scale. On YouTube I’ve already found myself watching more “slow/simple living” vloggers or “quiet vlogs” and videos such as those. I’ve unsubscribed to many of the more dramatic or chaotic channels I hung onto as well. I also plan to read more works about or by world leaders that focused on peace, so if you have any suggestions, let me know! Although now I think I’m starting to sound like I’m about to start a peace cult or something, so maybe I’ll have to add more chaos back into my life soon.

But if I can create world peace in the next year, that’d be cool too.

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So that’s my goal for this upcoming year. Hopefully I did pick a good one and I won’t find it too abstract. That is a slight concern of mine as I post this actually so we shall see!

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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