What do you really want from life?

Last year was a difficult one for me, both physically and mentally. I started the year having to stop playing five a side football, then was diagnosed with a flare up of my prostate cancer, which required life changing surgery. I spent much of the second half of the year bordering on depression and in a state of anxiety. As they say, all good things come to an end. Bad things do too, something we should remind ourselves of. As we head towards the end of the first month of 2024, I find myself in a completely different place mentally. My ankle had not recovered, the side effects of the surgery are slowly disippating and I am coming to terms with them, and most of all I have managed to regain a degree of positivity. 

As the evening start to get lighter, I am hoping this will take firm root. I have spent the last six months thinking about what I want from life. Being in a negative frame of mind, much of this was based around thinking about what I could no longer do, how I've physically diminished and how this was making me feel rather anxious and low. 

I started the new year, with a plan. As I had been feeling low, I'd self medicated with alcohol. Although I try and keep to a regime of three days a week where I don't drink, I slipped a bit. I justified this by saying I had a few weeks after the op where I didnt drink, so I was in credit. What was the real problem was that on the days I did drink, I was really binge drinking and undoing the good work of the days off. Furthermore, I was being greedy with food and eating many things that normally I simply don't fancy. I am not really a sweets and cakes person, but I probably ate more than I've eaten ever. I wasnt even particularly enjoying it. My weight responded as you'd expect and I gained a stone and a half.

As I often do, I stopped drinking for two weeks at the start of January. I find that this is a bit of a reset. I also stopped the habit of the chocolates and sweets. Since the start of the year, simply by doing this, my weight had dropped by 4kg. I am also finding myself feeling positive again, which has been my default. 

I have turned my thoughts again to "What do I want from life?" but this time thinking about all of the the things I do want, which I can do.  The one thing I can do is music, which I love. A strange quirk of my psyche is that the more miserable I am, the more creative I am musically. As the depression has lifted, I find that I have few, if any ideas for new songs. This is a good thing, as we have a backlog of material to work out properly. I can arrange tracks as this is a more disciplined task, so it is all falling into place rather well. Music gives me a perspective on my life and gives me feedback on my state of mind.  The band has gigs lined up and we want to release an album. I am actively finishing this off.

Then there are my friends and family. They are the best thing in my life. Yesterday I had a Damascene revealtion. This may sound odd, but as I chilled out and relaxed (the family were at the cinema), a really important realisation came to me. This will sound silly, but please hear me out. The thought popped into my mind "People are not psychic". This may sound obvious, but how often do we simply accept that people know things. We don't tell people how we care for and appreciate them. We get cross when they don't do something we assume that they would if they wre sensible. I realised that I have taken them very much for granted over the last half year, as I concentrated on my own issues. Now is time to put something back. 

But as I pondred this, I realised that much of the anger we expend is because we expect people to be psychic. When we curse the driver in front of us for not indicating or cutting us up, do we consider their state of mind? Maybe there is a good reason? Maybe if we just assuned when people drive badly that they have a challenge in their life, it would save us a lot of anger and make us calmer. 

How often do we hear people saying "I'm having a bad day". How often do we say "sit down, have a cup of tea and tell me all about it". When you get in from a hard days work and your partner is scowling at you, or your children are silent and grumpy, do you avoid them, crack a joke to try and lighten the mood or ask if there's anything you can do? Sadly I am guilt of usually avoiding people or annoying them when they are in need of a bit of support.  Then when I need support, I wonder why they treat me the same.

If someone was to ask me what I wanted from life, I'd say "to be happy and healthy", but I'm not sure that is a proper answer. I want all of my friends and family to be happy and healthy, I am never truly happy when a friend is suffering. I can't shut that out and I'd rather be there for them in a crisis than be happy whilst they suffer. I've come to realise that the first step to getting what I want from life is simply to try and share any happiness I might have, in the hope that a little bit of comes back when I need it. 

I truth, my friends did that for me last year. Perhaps I was to introverted at the time to appreciate it. I didn't make a resolution at the start of the year, but I will be trying to spread a bit more happiness. If we all did that, maybe the question in the title would answer itself.