Goals not gaols

I have spent a lot of time learning Irish and I find the words might come even more easily to me than Spanish as they are so unique and different and the i!teresting spellings of Irish words are actually an aid in helping me to remember. Maybe because when you are in Ireland you may easily get immersion in reading such words on signs which are often long enough that you could perhaps pick up Irish while driving. The thing I need, when I return to Ireland,by the way,  is a car rental, so I am not so trapped on the tourist trail and can have many new adventures.

Of course I have spent enough time in Ireland that maybe seeing signs as Gaeilge all the time and generally seeing Irish words a lot makes it a lot easier to pick it up now that I am ready. I have learned about a hundred words so far and really quite easily. I think in 12 weeks I am going to surpass my expectations with Irish, for sure, and I think I might get to that point in a week or two.

I am reviewing my progress on all of my goals at the end of each week, and I think my new goal after this week is to have Irish in 12 weeks at the equivalency of someone who has studied for one year. ll? With a background and lots of practice in learning languages and considering Irish just comes easy somehow like I am just meant to speak it that sounds like a very reasonable goal. Who knows, just get as good as I can at it.

I switched when I needed a break from studying lots of Irish to learning Python for a couple hours and I got through defining variables, types of variables, basic operations and assignment changing one type of variable into another, string formatters and the format method, lists and tuples.

I also watched the first episode of Komi Can’t Communicate. It’s sweet how they write on the blackboard at the beginning. I recognise some of the characters but as I haven’t practiced Japanese in a while I couldn’t immediately recall the sounds. Whenever I am doing something valuable or productive, I log it. When I am wasting time, I don’t log it. This helps me make sure that when I watch TV, I am watching with intention.  If I am, I get to log it.

Lots of things on my list of goals I have not started yet. I will pick Spanish up again in the next couple days probably but it is hard to get myself to switch as I get more and more comfortable with and excited about Irish.  It shouldn’t take much to keep up with Spanish: reading in Spanish is like my favourite free time activity, and it’ll just happen without my needing to force it. It’s just the flashcards I make that hold me back. I need to make an effort  to catch up with the flashcards for this book so I can keep reading without worrying about that. Missed flashcards are a missed opportunity to get vocabulary from reasing really deep in my brain. It doesn’t take too long to make the flashcards though. Then when I am in Guatemala it’ll be Spanish all the time, so that will help.

So I have worked on Irish, Film, content creation, and Python so far, and I have yet to touch Spanish, options trading, and Japanese this week, but: it is still early in the week, Spanish will take care of itself in a lot of ways. Options trading would exhaust me if I studied it intensely every day, but an hour every other day and maybe a few hours one morning or afternoon or evening a week would get me where I am wanting to go. With Japanese I still do not know what my rhythm for learning the characters is going to look like so I have no idea how much time will be involved and I may adjust the number of kanji that is my goal.

And then, music. That is the one that, if I really get into it, could take all my time away, so maybe it is better to get a little bit if anrhythm with these other projects first and then, maybe in a day or two, I can see what I can do with music, given that I will not have access to a guitar in Guatemala and that kind of feels too much anyway for a short trip. It will be interesting to discover what happens as far as music taking up my time when I get back into that too.

I was worried working on eight projects might feel like too much and even more likely than that was the possibility of others thinking I am out of my mind for attempting it. I feel like I would love to lead people in 12 week sessions of doing everything you want to do finally and get more done than you’ve ever gotten done before. There is no reason someone out there would not benefit from this process I’m discovering. Time feels so much more abundant: I feel like I set pretty decent goals and yet I feel like I am going to way surpass all my expectations in nearly all of them. Not Japanese though. I doubt I will end up learning more kanji than I set out to learn..

Throughout the 12 weeks I can spend half a week or even a week focused intensely on one or two topics and then go on to the others when I feel  in that energy. I want to make *some* progress on each of them every week but I am giving myself lots of flexibility within each week. No schedules, just moving from one interest to the next as I am led while periodically getting in touch again with where I am now in relation to my goals. I feel like I have

more time in a way than I have in ages. There are no rules except following my intuition and my desired feelings which come before my goals and they are what make my goals make sense.