The BOLD (I Could Have, You Know)
When the exhausting and imperious Lady Catherine De Bourgh demands her part in the conversation in Chapter 31 of Pride And Prejudice (see the quote above), she declares that she is sure that if she had ever applied what she believes to be her considerable natural talent to learning to play the pianoforte, she would have been an excellent player.
She never moved herself to take advantage of the opportunity that a love of music, ample funds to pay for a tutor and copious free time had offered her. She never learned to play.
We can imagine that if she was suddenly transported to a hovel with no piano, she would be just as likely to complain about its absence. She would miss what she never used.
Right now, I’m curious about how that phenomenon is playing out in our own lives. As we catalog our losses and our lack, are we missing what we were doing before the stay at home measures, or are we missing what we knew we could be doing. Are we deprived of activity or of choice? Is it FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) or FOHMO (Fear of Having Missed Out)?
And if it is choice that we really miss, what choices are we missing now?
The Whisper (FOMO for the Win)
Perhaps you can relate. I find myself popping into moments of awareness about what is missing. I’ll be humming along, and a thought will dart to the forefront.
“I’m excited about the keynote I developed for the conference.”
“I really feel like having lunch at Jade.”
“I’d love to go with Shanna to the movies.”
And then the awareness washes in behind that those options are not open to me right now. The loss is real, and we are all having an individual experience of a group experience. Your list of missing things is unique to you, though some of it might overlap with mine. Sadly, some of us are facing dire consequences—finances, occupation, health, grief. All of us are missing little things that seem big to us.
I noticed something in the middle of my list of missing things. I have been missing things I didn’t have.
“I can’t go to New York now.”
“Mark Mothersbaugh is in lockdown. Now we can’t have dinner.”
“The Paris Opera has suspended their season. Quelle dommage”
These are the losses of the person I imagine I could be, not the person I was in February. Driven by FOMO, I imagined all the things that I’m currently restricted from experiencing. Some of these are aspirational and were moving towards reality. I was hoping to go to New York this year. Maybe. All of these reveal important clues about my hopes, dreams and aspirations.
The Aspirational Audit
Now is the perfect time to perform an aspirational audit by using the lessons of limitation to understand what you miss and what you wish you missed. By paying closer attention to the missing pieces of our fantasy life, you can begin to devise plans and look for opportunities. For instance, I wonder if Mark Mothersbaugh is on zoom?
This might be a good application for journaling. To perform your audit, journal about the following:
- Create Your Inventory: Make a list of the things that you are missing right now (Note: This exercise will still work when we are not experiencing a global restriction crisis. It may just be easier to see this clearly right now.)
- Review that list: Next to each item, write in the approximate date of the last time you did the thing you miss. For the rest of the exercise, focus on the items that either have been a while or have never been.
- Mine the Data: For each aspirational loss, explore the roots of the missing opportunity. What would it mean to you to be able to do this thing now? What was preventing you from doing it before lockdown?
- Explore Options: Open up your creativity and see if you can develop one or more ways to have, prepare for, or replicate the root benefit these missing things would have provided.
For Instance
Let’s look at the Paris Opera as an example.
I have never been to Paris, let alone the opera, so it is on my aspirational loss list.
What would it mean to be able to attend the Opera in Paris right now? Well, I used to have Opera tickets for the season here in Richmond years ago. I went with a friend and I loved the social interaction of dissecting the performances together. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of sweeping, inspirational music, and clever performance. I’ve always wanted to go to Paris, and I’d love to have an excuse to dust off my rusty French language skills. I believe that I would enjoy the history and the architecture and the immersion into another way of living that a trip like that would provide.
What prevented me from this before lockdown? Money. Or, more accurately, my beliefs about money. Also, I think that I enjoyed the opera more for the company than the music and I have discovered that I prefer other forms of live performance more because most opera stories are a little too contrived and simple.
What is the data, then, from this exercise? The elements of this aspirational loss that appeal most to me are having a social experience of a great performance, re-invigorating my language skills and exploring another culture.
How will I have, prepare or replicate this in my life? I will continue to work with my coach to address my attitudes about money. I will invite a friend to live stream a performance online together so that we can have the fun of talking about it later. I think it will be fun to make the invitation and see who is interested. (Feel free to contact me if that sounds like fun to you.) I will consider engaging the French tutor I met at Toastmasters to explore what might help to refresh my French skills. I will contact my friend in the Alsace to see if she’s up for a zoom to practice. I will inspire myself by pinning some photos of Paris to my Pinterest page.
Who You Are is Who You Want to Be
Remember to revel in who you are while you are paying attention to who you want to be. That future vision of you, that aspirational self, is you in new places perhaps wearing new clothes and eating new dishes. It is, first and foremost, YOU. By noticing the elements of what you want, you are creating a more bite sized path to your future. By harnessing FOMO, we can carefully include the elements of our desired life without overwhelm and self-criticism.
What is aspirational you missing and how are you going to include that in your life, in quarantine and beyond?
Leave a Reply