How Should I Grade This Life?

Reflection on last year's birthday list of reminders for living

I’m a journaling gremlin most weeks of the year, but when my birthday approaches, I take to reflection like I’m getting paid per page. Something often emerges from that process like a poem, a list, or a manifesto of sorts. Last year, I created 33 reminders for living and wanted to revisit them to take a temp check of sorts on whether or not I stayed reminded throughout the past 12 months.

On my initial pass through the list, I decided to separate items into wins and losses columns. I started tallying the first few up and immediately felt gross. Was I really going to measure my last year of life in wins and losses? I tried other metrics, like success vs failure or strength vs weakness. Briefly, I considered viewing the list as what rose to the top and what sank to the bottom, but even that was just an attempt to dress up wins and losses in softer words.

I looked at the list again and realized that I had tried everything at least once. Some of it had been easy, some of it hard. A few hurt, many delighted me, and one nearly tore my heart out. Wasn’t that, then, overall a win? Listen, a year ago, I drew up a list of 33 items I thought important enough to live by, and for the next 12 months, I stayed aware of those reminders to guide many of my actions. An overall win!

So then, to take stock of the list more holistically, I decided to use a scatterplot instead to measure each item against difficulty and delight.

Scoring them this way invited compassion into the conversation. Rather than the black-and-white grading of success vs failure, this scatterplot allowed me to reflect more deeply on each reminder, how I interacted with it, and what resulted from the effort. As in: how did I feel trying on these reminders?

Measuring in wins vs losses or successes vs failures reduces a life to an outcome alone. The older I get, the more I see that the *point* might indeed be the experience itself—the journey, the process, the becoming. In plotting the reminders against my experience, I was able to feel into that journey, into my process, into the becoming. And when I look at my life that way, it’s really hard to refuse compassion and grace for the self, because I can’t deny that I tried. I tried. And that also could very much be the point of it all.

Next week: a few maximalist guidelines for my next year of life.