The Mental Journey

Physical, mental, and spiritual - that is what I hope my walk of 1,000 miles in 2013 will be. But defining a mental journey is harder than simply counting the steps that add up to the mileage goal.

My mental journey in the coming year will be two-fold. First, I want to study more and broach topics I wouldn't normally consider, stretching my mental boundaries, perhaps even stretching them back to a college campus for a second degree; even if they don't stretch a full 1,000 miles, the effort alone will be worthwhile. There is so much to learn in this world, and too often we stay in our small corner and fail to appreciate the larger views around us. Only by learning history, science, languages, culture, and more, can we truly begin to integrate an entire world into that which we call our worldview. I absolutely want my mental worldview to grow on this journey.

The second part of my mental journey will be to redefine concepts within myself. Because of barbs leveled at me from different sources through my life, from deliberate indifference to cruel insults to vitriolic attacks by those who claimed to be friends or family, I have developed warped definitions of accomplishment, success, and productivity. I readily admit to being a perfectionist, a workaholic, and obsessive-compulsive about details. In some ways, this serves me well, but in others, it skews my days with highs and lows that get stuck in my mental pathways, leading to a cycle of self-blame and recriminations that don't match the true offense (the perceived offense being much larger). I need to develop a better mental sense of scale, and I hope as the physical scale of this journey becomes clearer, so too will the mental scale be clarified.

There is no one of any age, education, or station in life who could not benefit from mental growth. By deliberately embracing that growth as part of this journey, I hope to create a new mental sense that can stay with me far further than just 1,000 miles.