Pen to Paper

Goals

A little over a month ago, I began a process of self-examination.  I stepped back to take a breath and look at my life, and I wasn’t happy with what I saw.  Someone pointed out to me that if our goals determine our actions, then by looking at our day-to-day actions we can deduce what goals our  lives will reach in the end.  Taking this approach and applying it to my own life, I realize that the way I had been living was not consistent with the life I want to have in 5, 10, 20 years, and so on.

I had gone beyond being content.  I had become complacent.  I was a consumer, feeding my daily appetites without lifting my eyes to see what was on the horizon, beckoning for my attention.

What did I do, coming to this realization?  Thinking that the solution to a lack of direction was concrete planning, I literally sat down and wrote out several lists.  What do I care about?  What are my goals in these area?  What steps do I need to take to reach these goals?  A pile of papers filled with scribbles grew on my desk.  And as the weeks went on, I could see that I was starting to make changes in how I spent my time.  It wasn’t enough, though.  I couldn’t seem to find enough time in the days and weeks to reach all the milestones I had set for myself.

At first, I began to panic.  Why was I not following the plans I had set up, the plans I thought to be well within my capabilities?  Didn’t they lead to goals I wanted to reach?  How could I live a goal-oriented life if I couldn’t even reach the small goals?

Distractions

One week ago, I was looking at the To-Do list I had made for myself and I realized that distractions aren’t limited to the periphery.  It’s easy to see that things like video games, Facebook, forums, and general web browsing can be distractions that bog down the day, taking time without giving anything back.  What was harder to see is that good things, goals that we do want to reach, can be distractions as well.

Take physical fitness, for example.  I finished my first marathon in January.  I was woefully under-trained, and was not very proud of the time I posted (proud that I finished: yes; proud of the way I finished: no).  Since then, I have not exercised much and generally been slothful.  “Okay,” I thought to myself.  “Here’s a goal.  I’ll do another marathon this fall, and this time I’ll train properly all the way up to it.”  I printed off a training plan I found online, and thought I was good to go.  After a month, though, I knew I was just falling behind the training plan.  Instead of running daily, I was getting in one or two days a week.  Instead of saying “I want to be fit,” and pursuing that through various means, I saw the training plan as the only benchmark for success.

This wasn’t the only setback.  Many of the other goals and plans I had set for myself were in similar states of partial completion.  Instead of putting myself back on track, I was feeling guilty about letting myself down.

At the same time, though, something strange was happening in my thinking.  While the majority of the goals I thought were concrete grew hazier, one became more and more solid in my mind.  I began to feel that all the other goals could go by the wayside if I just pursued and chased after this one vision.

As this realization dawned on me, I saw that while the other goals had been good, I had set them too high.  These “want-to’s” did not belong on the same level as the “have-to.”  By elevating the secondary, I was distracting myself from the Primary.

Vision

People have different names for the Primary.  For some, it is a Calling.  Others, a Mission.  I like the terms Vision and Passion, but they all work.  I capitalize these words here, because when you speak with someone who has latched on to their Vision you can her the capitalization in their voice and see it in their eyes.  You can tell that they are pursuing something of significance with their lives.

The Vision that has been living in my mind for several years, but only recently gaining weight and solidity, is to be a Writer (again, the capital).  There are many authors who are published.  There are a few, though, whose works have endured and grown in the public mind to become an institution greater than a person putting their ideas on paper.  Think of William Shakespeare.  Henry David Thoreau.  Mark Twain.  Emily Dickinson.  Edgar Allan Poe.  H.P. Lovecraft.  Jules Verne.  C.S. Lewis.  J.R.R. Tolkien.  Ray Bradbury.  Isaac Asimov.  Robert Heinlein.  Arthur C. Clarke.  Orson Scott Card.  Douglas Adams.  This list probably gives you an idea of where my tastes lie, but it’s not meant to be exclusive – just exemplary.  Is it too lofty to dream of adding my name to the list?

Realizing that this is the goal, the Vision that I need to pursue, had two effects.  First was a sense of guilt over how I’ve used (or misused) the past year and a half.  This quickly faded in the sense of freedom I had.  Deciding to pursue one goal all-out freed me to say “these other goals are just distractions.  I can work towards them or not, but I don’t have to.  They don’t have a claim on me.”

Pruning

In effect, this realization let me prune my goals.  The purpose of pruning a plant is to remove unwanted parts in order to encourage growth in desired area.  Let me apply this gardening imagery to my thought process.  Initially, I had a plot of land that I wasn’t doing much with.  Grass, weeds, a few bushes, but by and large the growth and development of the land was unguided.  By generating concrete lists of goals, I was simultaneously trying to remove weeds and plant several different trees.  Now, by latching on to a Vision, I feel like I am trimming back most of the trees and bushes in order to encourage one particular tree to grow.  Not removing the other plants, but not giving them undue preference.

The Next Few Months

You may be asking yourself, “Okay, so what’s he going to do now?”  First off, I’m going to spend more time writing – a lot more time.  That includes this site.  At the beginning of the year, I wrote down that I wanted to have a blog I was updating at least three times per week with professional quality.  Clearly, that hasn’t been happening.  It will.  I’m also planning on doing some redesign for the site, in order to make it more my own.

Second, I’m going to pursue publication.  For a long time, I’ve had a fear of submission, as though putting my work out to be rejected was worse than not creating anything at all.  Well, I’m already unpublished.  There is no possible way that I could become less published than I am now.  That will change.

If you’ve come this far, let me challenge you.  Is your life consistent taking you where you want to be down the road?  Are your goals detracting from your Passion?  Don’t give into the the trap of paralyzation through constant introspection, but a little bit of self-examination can go a long way.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 at 9:38 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.