Another year and more sand.

[Matt - a simple hobbit]

It has been awhile since I last posted about my life and training. Hard to imagine that it has been a year and a half since I was a regular attender of evening classes with other Mountain Warriors. Training continues in martial arts and life for me even though I don't get to be a part of the great classes together.

I have been working on my goals for this next year for the past month. I think I have them settled now. 

Educational Goal: Complete doctorate program in March. Our first reader and expert advisor have passed our work. In two weeks, our final reader will review our work and if passed, we will head to our oral defense in March. This is our last requirement to be met.

Daily Movement Goal: I am tweaking a bit of my physical goals for 2012. I am going to continue to try to work in some aspect of my Kung Fu training daily and P90X weekly work-outs. The change this year is that I want to incorporate three different spaces of strong movement a day. One of these three will be a hour to two hours in length. The other two will be a minimum of 15 minutes of movement. For example, on Monday I did a brisk walk up and down the trail through campus for about 2 miles. Around the noon hour I did my chest, shoulders, and triceps work-out. In the evening I went through my double-stick routine ending with some free-flow. Our research has suggested to me that much of our information overload that comes with living in our current culture can be processed better if increase and space out our movement throughout the day.

Daily Information Goal: This is a new kind of goal for myself. Since my job is primarily interacting and leading college students, I must be available and responsive through email and facebook. In order for my life to be spent less on a screen and more outside, I hope to only be on computer solely to respond or initiate communication. This takes on many forms, but my goal is that it accounts for a maximum of five times per day at five minutes or less per time a day.

Reconnection Goal: Since we have spent so much time research and writing for the past four years, we have a goal to be intentional every week to connect with friends, family, and/or the trail. So far we are sprinting towards this goal. We have been at the coast or in the gorge for the past four weekends with friends and family.

Interest Goal: If I find myself bored or hungry for some fresh engagement, I have picked five topics that I want to dive deep in over the course of this year. The small number is significant. In our day and age, we bounce around from interesting topic to interesting topic very rarely going past the surface of anything. This will keep me postured for experiencing depth in five topics through the year. Posturing for depth is a corrective to our times.

[Matt - a simple hobbit]

It is time again for the quarterly reflection on my goals for this year ... a time to reflect and refocus if need be.

Educational goal: We are still celebrating the completion of our academic goal and yet I am also beginning to miss the structure of a intense learning community around a topic of interest. I am finding that most folks day to day want to stick to conversational topics that dance on the surface and are rather shallow. Mastery longs for depth and we live in a culture of shallows. Most days I want to throw folks out of the kiddie pool into the deep end and embarrassingly some days I find myself going through the day staying in the shallows myself. I must be more intentional here and not be formed by our culture.

Daily Movement goal: I love this goal! Keeps the blood moving, the brain buzzing, and the hunger for more life growing to new levels. One movement a day is kung fu belt material, another is P90X or hoops, with the final being the three forms I know. Time to get a new form.

Daily Information goal: Hmm ... I have done better with simplifying my news intake, but my email and facebook time has jumped again now that school is back in session. I am noticing that college students respond quicker to fb posts now than text or phone calls. Interesting. This goal needs more attention.

Reconnection goal: I don't want to honk my own horn, but yea, good attention and time has been given here. I am working towards reconciling some old family relationships that have been strained as well as reconnecting with old friends in the area. I have found great meaning and value with this goal this year.

Interest goal: My interest goal has settled on engaging three subjects now. Simplicity, Service and Silence. Our culture is increasing complex, selfish, and full of loud and unhelpful voices/noises. Each week I am giving attention to one of these themes of interest and incorporating some practice to be countercultural in my pursuit towards the mastery of living life well.

[Joseph Bronson]

You are an inspiration to us all Matt. I would like to see all of my students setting goals and following through. Come on everybody, Matt is showing how it is done. Read his blog posts for inspiration and direction. Of course I would love to here that one of those new goals would be becoming a second degree Black Belt :):):) The new heights in physical development would astound you.  

[Matt - a simple hobbit]

It is time for the quarterly reflection on my goals for this year ... a time to reflect and refocus if need be.

Educational goal: DONE! We passed our dissertation defense. All that is required now is to successfully walk across the stage to get the diploma in a month. Wahoo. This goal has moved from academics to financial in focus for the rest of the year. We are tightening the belt and aggressively going after our school loans. We have paid off two small ones and have to larger ones remaining.

Daily Movement goal: So far I have been able to work in 2 significant times of movement a day about 75% of my days. I haven't been able to have a perfect week of 3 times of intentional movement a day. That is my next mini-goal within this larger goal.

Daily Information goal: I am not meeting this goal well thus far. I am finding myself on the computer more than I anticipated this spring with job requirements and requests. I need to keep this boundary to have more vibrant days.

Reconnection goal: Excellent work here. We are enjoying a season of reconnection with family and friends. 

Interest goal: Hmm ... I think due to our completion of our defense we are taking a much needed time off of pursuing new interests and rather have turned towards revisiting the books and topics that we found intriguing over the last four years. There is a hunger to move towards mastery in the topics we found interesting before pursuing new topics. I might have to reform this goal.

[suzanne sanders]

 Great Goals!