It is important to make a commitment to do the exercise at more or less the same period every year so that you can use it as an annual life tune-up, much as you would for your car or your house. The objective is to review all the significant things that have happened over the course of the past year and to give voice to your heart’s longings for the coming months and years. The Year-End Review is intended to help you become the gardener of your own life-planting seeds at the year’s end and watching them germinate and grow over the years to come. Without this kind of tune-up, our lives will wander, we’ll get lazy or fall asleep at the wheel, wondering why we’re missing the boat, or why we have so little time for the things we really love. It is in fact the first step in beginning to live in a Not So Big way-that is, with your focus completely on the journey through life, rather than on any particular goal or destination.Īmazingly enough, though we usually recognize the importance of looking after our bodies, we rarely consider the value of ensuring that the things we are engaging in during our experiential lives are in alignment with our heart’s true desires. A primary tool in this process of waking up in your life and of learning how to listen is something that I call the Year-End Review. When I wrote The Not So Big Life, it was with the intention of helping readers develop the skill of inner listening, so they could find their way to the meaningfulness that everyone longs for in their lives, yet is elusive to so many of us.Ī Not So Big Life is a life lived wide awake, so that no matter where you are or what you are doing, you are aware and open to the nutrients that are being set before you in each moment for your own inner growth. All of us have dreams for ourselves and our lives, but to actually live those dreams requires us to take the time to listen, to pay full attention to what our heart longs to do, and to express those longings.

The not so big life