The In Between.

Turns out every empty platitude might be true after all. I’ve been feeling lost recently, really lost. I feel out of balance and unable to stabilize anything in my life. I just want some semblance of control and every measure that I take feels like it’s not quite enough to shift that balance. I was reminded today, listening to a podcast that most of our lives is spend aiming for goals. But it’s a paradoxical activity, because we spend time in anticipation of reaching that goal, waiting for it to provide us what we want, to make us happy. But when we reach it, it suddenly becomes the past and no longer can bring us what we want. Our time is much better used if we learn to like the doing, which does not at all mean that the doing always needs to make us happy. Part of the doing is experiencing difficult and sometimes terrible things. But goals don’t provide us with much at all.

The process of doing is always there, we are always doing. But we often choose to ignore it, as we think of it in service to something larger. Even worse, often there is no goal, no aim, and so there is both no anticipation and no enjoyment of the process. I think that’s where I am. There is no larger goal and I’m simply doing. I need to slowly shift my mindset to see that there is a beauty in the minutia. It always comes back to being present. What is the point of doing all the work, if I can never appreciate or see the work I’m doing. I don’t need to be in service of a goal because there are ongoing processes that I do appreciate and yet don’t validate. Spending time with the people I love is not a goal, but an ongoing process that is unending. There are processes that I don’t love, like working or doing the dishes, but there are so many in between that I really do appreciate, I just choose not to see it because I want to reach for something final, something I can quantify and check off. Goals have never worked for me anyway.