Archive for October, 2008
[I have an idea for a direction I'd like to take for a bit with my blog. A mini-series of posts, if you will, about my goals. Please excuse the lack of editing, this was "thumbed" out on my iPhone on a flight from Seattle to Chicago to Miami.]
Right now, I’m flying above the earth, pleasantly situated among friends, on the sunny side of the plane, and at a window seat. And while it’s true that half the journey is the getting there, we’re all looking forward to the destination. Direction is key. For all the times I’ve flown, all the times I’ve sat through an airline employee explaining to full grown adults how to buckle a seat belt, not once have I flown the friendly skies purely for the experience of it – a certain destination is always in mind.
Life is the same way. Without goals, we become lost in getting by and making do, and if those come easily any leftover energy is poured into keeping oneself entertained from day to day. Entertainment, while a legitimate respite from work, once moved into real excess dissovles into the doldrums of selfishness, boredom, and a total lack of accomplishment.
The cure for floating along sans meaning is a bit of reflection: you only have one life, what do you want to do with it? What do you want to be? How can you get there? When can you start? Goals drive us to challenge ourselves to accomplish more than just merely making ends meet or feeling happy in the moment – they bring us longterm joy through the satisfaction of real value wrought from this life.
Consider how quickly a year full of Saturdays slip through our fingers. It’s hard to recognize the scarcity of life because, as they say, one is immortal right up until they die. I heard the story of a man who calculated at age 25 that he would likely live until 75, leaving him 50 years left to enjoy, or 2,600 Saturday afternoons. To remind himself of how precious each moment was, he filled a jar with a marble for each Saturday he had left, and every Saturday he would remove one, a reminder that a Saturday once spent is gone forever. This physical representation of the hourglass of life struck a chord with me – how short life really is! How precious each Saturday!
With the Saturdays of my life on the decline (and really, whose aren’t?), I relize how much I’ve yet to accomplish. How much I want to accomplish. I despertly want to look back at a life well lived once I’m old and have things to be proud of, not just be able to say I fought off starvation and boredom for a century or less.
Recognizing you can’t go anywhere without stepping out in a specific direction, I’m setting some goals. Recognizing you can’t go everywhere, I’m keeping the list simple. Recognizing there will be conflicts, I’m prioritizing. I can’t try to do everything, but I can try to make sure those things I do really matter.
[To Be Continued...]
After watching today’s U.S. presidential debate, this quote came to mind, often attributed to an inspiration, Alexis de Tocqueville, though the author is technically unknown:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
