I’m sick of having half-baked ideas of what I might like to do or activities I’ve always wanted to try. This period of my life is for getting in and doing these things … or letting them go entirely. Either is fine, as long as they get out of the ether of my head and are either pinned down into a more concrete form or dismissed.

So how do I do this? Start with the end in mind, Start as you mean to go on. The important word in both those sentences is ‘start’. Just start. What’s the very first thing I need to do to actually start? There is always one simple action that can put me on the road to what I want to do.

The first step may hardly be a step at all. It might be looking up the names of music teachers in the phone book. (The second step would be phoning.) The smaller the step, the less challenging it is and the more likely that you will do it. Somehow just looking up the number is not threatening but the thought of ringing straight away is. So write the number on the list of tasks. That’s the step for today. One day—perhaps tomorrow— I’ll look at that entry and suddenly it will be easy to pick up the phone and start the ball rolling.

The other aspect is that some of the activities we’d like to do are things we’d simply like to try rather than make them a permanent part of our lives. I think it’s quite legitimate to have that attitude with everything. I’m just going to try this for a while. I’ll put my heart into it while I’m trying it, but it’s also okay to say that I’ve had a go and I’m happy with that, then be able to drop it without guilt or a feeling of failure or giving up. I’ve done that with a few interests and have reached a place where I can say I’m happy I’ve had the experience but I don’t need to be the world’s best at that skill or try to carry it through the rest of my life.

What a relief that is. I get to do the things I want to do but don’t need to feel, when starting, that I need be tied to it forever if it’s something for which I end up having a relatively short attention span. And I don’t get to the end of my life wishing I’d had a go at piano, bricklaying, pottery, singing, leadlighting, cello, my own website …

On my deathbed I don’t want to have regrets that I let life pass by without trying activities that take my fancy. I don’t want to die wondering.

Have you ever noticed that happiness is easier to recognise in retrospect? You can think, “I was happy then,” while honestly admitting that you might not have been thinking much about happiness at the time. You were just living your life in the moment. Experiencing it.

Happiness is part of living. So is sadness. Our eternal quest to be happy has a built-in failure switch, for life will always bring some grief, some anger, some kind of angst.

I’m starting to recognise another way for this sliding scale that goes all the way from absolute joy to deepest sorrow. Okayism.

I’m really happy in this moment, and that’s okay. I’m grieving for a lost one and that’s a natural part of life too, so that’s okay as well. Once everything is okay, whatever it is, you can get on with feeling the emotion that comes with it, watching the thoughts that crop up and dealing with life’s challenges and difficult moments with equanimity. When everything—good or bad—is okay, it puts you on a much more even keel.

So next time when someone asks me what I want from life, I hope I don’t say, “I just want to be happy” because I know deep in my heart it’s not always possible. But equanimity? I’ll be okay with that.

When we were on holidays some years ago we came across an old cattle watering site. There was a very, very long concrete trough which could water hundreds of cattle at a time.

The other day I was thinking of that trough as a parable for the way we live our lives. We come to a challenge.That is our trough. We can power through, which might be scary but is soon over and we get out on the other side, wet but ready to walk on firmer ground. and never see that trough again.But we have other options. We can get in then decide to stay on the safe side where we’ve already been. We can get out and walk up a bit further, only to find the trough is still there and the distance to swim is the same. Even worse, we can swim along the length of it and stay in that trough forever.

It’s an interesting analogy for the way we live our lives, isn’t it?

How is it that we can be on a winning formula and yet fail? I think it’s because we get bored. We adore the romance of something totally new (even if we’re not sure it will work), which is quite paradoxical when you think about how little we like change in other respects. Perhaps we just like change when it is led by our fickle nature!

The winning formula is not at fault. The boredom is not even the problem. It’s that we perceive that we should do something about the boredom. I am increasingly of the opinion that we shouldn’t take any different action but should slog through it without too much thought, sticking to our winning ways. We should look at the lure of the new for what it is: Something different that despite its bright and shiny look, its intrigue and persuasive nature, comes with no guarantee and may lead us down the tunnel of failure if we answer its call.

Boredom that leads to thoughts of change when we know we are succeeding with what we are doing should send out danger signals. I’m not saying that anyone should deny that there is a touch of ho hum from doing the unromantic, unthrilling, same old thing. But if that is progressing us to where we want to be, perhaps the boredom is a necessary stage that has to be lived through to get to where our actions are totally habit driven.

We never seem to get bored cleaning our teeth. And yet it’s the same old, same old. Perhaps it’s because we have gone past the place of boredom (with the help of our parents when we were small) into that secure little haven called routine.

Seeing our boredom as just a phase will take away its sting. It will put it in its proper place—just part of the overall picture—and keep us at peace with our inner selves. We already know the right thing to do. Even if it’s not exciting.