Prologue

Over the years, I’ve worked harder and harder to find meaning in life. But the more I've looked, the more I’ve wondered if I was going about my search the wrong way.

I've been looking for meaning through experience, but I think now that I've always had it backwards. Life will never be defined by extravagant experience, but about finding extravagance in common experience. So for 2009, I'm going to focus less on living large, and focus more on living well. Each month I'll start a new month-long project (like trying to run 3 miles faster than George Bush), to find uncommon results from common experience. Each project will involve daily activity, so every day of 2009 you can check my progress on the monthly projects and see what I discover.

None of these projects will cost much—in fact, I think most will be free. So if you're looking for a year uncommonly rich, you can join me. There's no membership required, just participate and comment if you want. Either way, get ready for a year I hope is unlike any other.

Epilogue

I stumbled across the finish line, but I manage to complete 8 of the month-long projects successfully. Blogging is now over at Wonderfam!

 
 

It's February, and February was a …

A Month of Accomplishment (about)

 

~ or ~

 

Forcing myself to finish something (about)

 

07
01

It great to realize it’s not a competition, especially when you would’ve lost

Written by Nathan on July 1, 2009 at 12:07 pm from A Month of Serving.

If there was a single overriding realization I made over this month of serving, it would be that my wife is much better at serving than I am. While it’s great that I have just a great teacher and model in my wife, it’s got to at least a little frustrating for her. So much of my service is for her, and so much of her service is for me, I spent the month worried she was getting a bad deal. There were many times I found myself feeling like I was losing, and strove for some sort of numerical parity.

Fortunately this wasn’t a competition, and serving isn’t about quantity. My wife serves me so often because I ask for help all the time. And she takes care of me because I need it. But most of all, she loves me and that drives her to action all the time. Whether I ask for help 20 times in a day or not, I’ve realized she’s so good at this because she’s oriented toward me all the time.

That’s been the crux of this month; checking my orientation to see if it matched the destination I wanted. I wanted to serve Jenn, but was I oriented toward her? I think it’s a basic general principle all over the place… Want to be a musician? Start studying & making music. Want to be a writer? Start writing, critically reading and get peer reviews.

For this month I learned that to really serve Jenn I needed to be all about her, honed in and ready. That obviously applied when she was around but I found it also applied when she wasn’t. When she was away, I was constantly ready to step up and often when others needed help. Those other acts of service better prepared me for the times when she was present, and generally just being attentive to her meant that over the month I had to ask less if I could help, and more often how I could help.

I never really set any metrics to measure if this was successful, but Jenn found out last week was I had been doing and she didn’t laugh at the notion I’d been serving her this month. So perhaps I fared alright. Regardless, I know that I pay better attention to her and I’m quicker to set aside distractions when there’s an opportunity to take action.

On second thought, perhaps I’ll close out this month’s project by asking her how I did. If this really has been all about her, then asking that questions is probably more important than whatever answer she gives.

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