Dear LPG readers

I don’t think that this just happens to you when you get older.  Even if we don’t make New Year’s Resolutions because we know that they are a bit of a fad, and that we never keep them, we all like to get stuck into something new at the beginning of a new year and it is so easy to forget the half-finished things that seemed so exciting when we started them.

Perhaps, we older people have just had more time to experience the phenomenon for two reasons.   Firstly, having to go to work does not get in the way so we can choose more ambitious projects without having to worry about how pointless they are sometimes, and secondly, we have had so much longer to experience everything by the time we retire that when an idea gets into the head, we think that we can see all the possible stumbling blocks before we start.

But what do you do when you undertake to do something and it is more difficult than you first thought.   When we offer to help because someone has asked, life often gets even more complicated.  That someone is now waiting for the promised result and it is all taking that much longer.

By the time we become pensioners we have nearly all been there, but are you a quitter or do you persevere no matter how long it takes.  I took a good look around my home the other day and there are at least two projects that come to mind immediately.  There is the jumper I knitted which is finally finished.  It only needs a couple of buttons now, but it has taken me so long to get this far that the child I made it for is much too big for it, and all those pictures that I promised myself I would catalogue by doing just a few each week.  I did get started but sort of gave up a few weeks into last year. 

I think that there is no use starting yet another project until I have either completed these or at least worked on my schedule so that time is allotted for getting into the habit of advancing the ongoing ones regularly.  So I have resolved to either get them finished or to make them my New Year’s Resolution this year rather than moving on to something else.

It occurs to me that there must be many readers who would be able to compile a half-finished to do list and now might just be the time so that 2022 starts out being the year that you finished 2021 before you face any new project you may have in mind.

I hope that I have written this message in time to give your mind a little jog.

DP, Lewisham