Dear LPG, 

I have often been told that I am the eternal optimist by my friends because, as old as I am, I continue to believe that there is always another dream or goal left to be attained in all of us.  I really hope that there is no reader who will tell me that they have achieved absolutely everything that they want to in life.  I strongly believe that there is always a dream that we want to realise no matter how old we are, and no matter how small it might be.

Nearly all of us oldies also have found ourselves with things that we have undertaken to do on a continued basis (…the grandchildren we take to school every morning, the person we visit every Tuesday afternoon, the club that we attend every Friday. There are so many ongoing duties that we manage to take on) but while we have those virtual plates spinning, they can leave us so committed to maintaining their momentum that we forget the excitement of having an achievement that we can add to our set of ‘…done that, been there, bought the tea shirt’ accomplishments. 

I hope that no matter how old you get, every one of us still has dreams, both huge and small, that we should like to have achieved.  I say ‘have achieved’ because while the journey is as important as success, it is good to work towards being able to look back on some of them as completed.

I wonder if there is something that you would really like to achieve but, when you look at the likelihood of getting it done, you or your friends help you to make excuses that put you off even trying.  Just in case you are not sure what I mean I have found a list of excuses which it might be worth checking just to see if you are using any of them to put yourself off getting started.  As with so many items on the internet, they assume that only the young need to know such things but it is easy to adapt each and every one of these to fit a retired person if you try hard enough, and the best thing for us older people is that they don’t necessarily need to be focussed on making money because at our time of life most of us are passed all that.  There is one missing though; I think that the easiest excuse for all retired people is, ‘I am too old to start all that now’.  

I found another reason why we sometimes have goals that we might never achieve on the internet which tells that we have to make them SMART so that we can be sure of when they are achieved, and I want to share it with readers.  Apparently this is something that is taught to much younger people as they work at their big life-changing goals, but I think, no matter how small your dream or goal, it might be worth looking at. 

LN, Forest Hill.

LN offers us those excuses and some information about streamlining your goals… 

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…and LPG adds some information on today’s celebration… 

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