An End

I began Look Homeward, Martin ten years ago. Today, I say good-bye.

For me, "The End" means completion. With this final post, I complete Look Homeward, Martin. 

This blog began with a different me - a recent college graduate, still living at home, who had a vision for living without true knowledge of how to truly live it.

Now, I have reached a point, ten years later, where I live in the world of many of the choices I made then and across these ten years - choices to live a helping career in Library & Information Sciences; choices to live a creative life in writing and filmmaking; and choices to orient my life around travel and experience.

In reaching the completion of this blog, my posts became less frequent. I view this as something positive. I write less on here because I live more. 

Through Look Homeward, I worked through this process of performing my life's vision in naming experiences, obstacles, and goals. 

Thank you for reading along with me.

Revising the 50 List for A Post-Pandemic Life

I shared my "50 List" over five years ago.

In writing that list, I attempted to create a vision of an upcoming period of my life - a life where I felt solid and stable in my career. I tried to avoid a lot of specific goals and write vision statements.

That list reads differently in a post-pandemic world and to my post-pandemic self. My new therapist urged me to rewrite the list because I am not the same. 

Last year felt like living in a house that kept burning down - a horrifying feeling. It felt exhausting to continually recover everything and return to a new normal. At a certain point I had to let go of things I no longer had the energy to keep. For instance, I let go of hockey after my 20 years of fandom because intuitively it no longer fits in the life I want now.

The paramount question from last year: what do I still want in my life after the pandemic? This question motivates me to revise my "50 List" into something simpler - a list of vision statements that cohere into a new vision of how I will define goodness and stability in my life.

A Revised 50 List

• Write and direct a film every year.
• Travel once every year 
• Pay off student loan debt.
• Own a guitar that I can pass on to those I love.