Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Goals

The problem with trying to achieve a goal is that I don't think a legitimate goal, one worth striving for, can truly be achieved. To me, a goal is something just beyond your reach, a sign in the sky marking a spot where you want to be. If you've ever taken a physics lab you're familiar with something called interpolation. I think that you can only interpolate your goals and your dreams, which is why they are all too often just beyond your grasp and not entirely what or where you expected them to be. You see, from way over here, that pie in the sky goal is out there at some point, but it is also an interpolation from a specific vantage point. Just like how the sun and the moon and the stars look just about the same from Alabama as they do from Texas. From here, that star appears to be right overhead. But my sister in Texas might have the same thought about that star and claim it for her own.

Goals are worth reaching for. They are worth keeping in sight. But almost every goal that I have technically reached has morphed into something new, something further, something greater than it had been when I set out for it.

In this same vein, my goals, dreams and desires seem to evade me. The line in the sand is continually redrawn. But along the way I have found that the pleasure of my goals, dreams and desires is often found in my honest and pure attempt at achieving them. As if they only serve as a guiding light, a star in the sky that I can proclaim to be my own. Because to me, it is right over my head and I can reach out and grab it.
"Life isn't about waiting for the storms to pass...it's about learning how to dance in the rain." -Vivian Greene
"Success is not final, Failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts." -Sir Winston Churchill