January 2009

Continuing on my thoughts the other day about the difference between knowing what you want and getting what you want it only makes sense to talk about what happens after that. Or at least, after you’ve isolated some kind of goal. How do you stay locked in and focused on attaining that? Hell if I know.

That probably wasn’t the answer you were hoping for but it’s the truth. I struggle with this as much if not more than anything. In some situations I’m not too shabby in the ‘decide what I want’ stage, but often get distracted by something shiny long before I get my hands on what I was after in the first place. This happens in pretty much every aspect of my life. Sometimes I even watch it happening – I see the distractions, realize they are taking me off course and immediately decide to correct that and get back on course… right after I finish this thing here… oh wait, I should write that down before I forget it… wait… what was I getting at? Oh nevermind, if it’s important it’ll come back to me later.

Take this for example – today someone asked me what my plans for the night were. “Staying home and catching up on my blogging” was my reply, I believe. I have a list of about 25 things I’m simply dying to write about and haven’t and I wanted to chop a few off of that. I got home around 7pm and opened my laptop. I responded to some emails, started IMing with people – some too much, some not enough, I posted some news on SF Metblogs then got in an argument about if bloggers can be a news source or not and suddenly it’s midnight and I haven’t crossed one thing off the “to blog” list. Yet. Luckily “struggling to keep focus” is one of those. Zing!

That’s a macro view of a much larger issue of course. The same thing happens on far grander scale all the time. And it’s not really new. I have a pretty big tattoo about just that. Well, kind of just that. Basically it’s about how when you start off doing something – anything really – it often looks simple and straight forward. You see your path laid out for you and you get moving. The more you get involved the harder it is to see the path and things start changing. By the time you get to the end it’s entirely different than what you set out to do, and frequently there were outside forces that threw buckets of wrenches into your plans, and even more frequently the whole thing repeats itself. Again and again. I got that tattoo when I was 19, if only I’d known what I was foreshadowing for myself.

In a kind of fitting way, I don’t know where I’m actually going with this thought process at the moment, but it’s something weighing on me a lot recently and something I’m trying to work through. If I figure out the solution, I’ll be sure to blog it.

Just working on a new theme, things might be wonky. please hang tight.

I paraphrased Malcolm X the other day to a friend and said “No one will give you happiness, you have to take it.” What Malcolm X actually said wasn’t about happiness as much as justice and equality, but I think the underlying philosophy is the same. The only one who can make our own lives better is ourselves, and if sit around waiting for someone else to do it, or put the weight of the improvement on someone else the only thing we get is older and more disappointed.

Saying that, knowing it, and doing it are all very different things. It’s not easy – just figuring out what you need to make you happy can be the hardest part. Most of us are brought up thinking if you follow the rules and stick to plan A, B, or C for X number of years we’ll eventually be rewarded with happiness, and if we’re lucky we’ll steal a few glimpses of it now and again until it finds us. Like magic, *poof* one day we’ll just be happy. Of course it doesn’t work that way and until we know what makes us happy, we won’t have any luck grabbing hold of it. There’s endless things that others will offer to us, things that might even make them happy but that doesn’t count. There is no substitute for knowing for yourself. I’ve learned a hell of a lot about myself in the last few years but I’m pretty sure I’m only just beginning.

Like Jules in Pulp Fiction I’m tryin’ real hard, maybe not so much to be the shepard but at least to see the enlightened path. Viva la Revolution.