I am not sure how I ended up with dead people goals while I am still alive, but I did. I seem to insist there are these permanent states of good feeling but resist the same notion when it comes to anything negative. What this whole living vs. dead people goals has underscored for me is that I keep thinking there is permanency. Like I labor and live under this very large delusion that if I just do this or that or this other thing, I will be arrived at a place where I can rest. Where I can relax and stop having to work so hard...to maintain the shifting sands of life lived.
I want permanency.
And that is just not available to me, or anyone.
Ever.
And so I suffer.
I want a love that endures, a partner that is willing, my looks to defy aging, my body to recover as if it were still youthful, for my parents to never die, for my children to grow up but not away, for clients to listen to me when I tell them hard things. I want to only have to do a minimal amount of effort, and then I would really like to get everything exactly where I want it, and then lock in, you know, like you do with a mortgage rate.
But that is all about attempting to make dead people goals living goals. I see that now.
I think living people goals, and I say think because truly, I am just figuring this out, living people goals must account for the temporariness of life and living. Living people goals must be more concerned with the present moment. This time right now that we are alive and breathing and living. I cannot fix the past, it is forever etched. And the future, well that is also beyond my control except in my orientation and willingness to deal with this present moment.
I spend a great deal of time reading in my backyard. Like hours a week. I won’t tell you the actual number lest you think I am a slackard. But I have read no less than 9 books in the past two months...and I rarely read thin books. I like big fat books. Ones that crack your excitement open with the first bend of their spine and then subsume you in their leafy pages. Inviting you to become lost within their interiority.
Ok, sorry, that was a little book pornication. I love them so very much and I just can’t seem to get enough of them.
But what I started to say before I got all weird about books, was that this time I spend in my backyard reading is my best inhabitation of the present moment. I am there, lying in the sun, turning the pages, drinking water. And then I get too hot so I dip into the pool and float around for a bit. When I do, I glance upwards and outwards and marvel at the world that exists in this backyard space. How tidy and quaint. How teeming with life it is: the butterflies, bees, crows, hummingbirds, hawks and scrub jays own the day, While the possums, raccoons, rats and other night creatures rule the night. And there I am in the midst of it all, just floating and mired in the presence of it all.
I have arrived at an age where long term goals feel somewhat like a challenge to God. Like if I start making 10 year plans, that I might just be foretelling my own doom. So I am pretty sure that living people goals for me, aren’t oriented to some future point in time. I think long range goals are reserved for the young. This is not to say that I should not aim for things or move myself out of my comfort zone and into something else, but I am not going to change careers, move away or really do anything rash...I like to fantasize about that but in reality, my long term goals are just to be here, living where I do and enjoy it.
So living people goals today look like this:
1. Maintain and support recovery.
2. Continue to do the inner work that supports my evolution as a human being.
3. Be here, now.
4. Make the enjoyment of my life a part of every moment I possibly can.
5. Be kind.
6. Be of service in small and large ways that support a loving world.
7. Take care of myself in body, mind and spirit.
8. Read more books.
9. Get more cats.
10. Travel to invigorate my mind and soul.
11. Help my children launch into this world and my parents leave it.
12. Write. There are several books in me, I only need make the time.
13. Spend time with horses.
14. Get chickens again.
15. Walk in nature daily and marvel at the vistas and hum of the natural world.
16. Use my intelligence and education to help other people.
17. Come to understand my own frailties and issues better and then share that with others.
18. Spend less time checking my phone and other devices and more time with actual people.
19. Be grateful for all the emotions I get to experience and release my need to lock into happy only.
20. Be amazed every single day and remember to laugh as often as I can.
These are my current living people goals. They embody everything I want and need in my life today. This assessment feels peaceful, doable, and promising. It feels like my life right now. These goals are not meant for some future time where I am better and more together or less tormented or less weird or wired differently. They are here and now goals that are accessible to me in this moment.
I see now my need to lock in only kept me forever stuck in some other reality that was not mine. Some future place where I was better, more together, had it all figured out and I can see now the only time that will ever happen is the moment just before I am no longer here...
Life comes at you pretty fast, then it slows way down and feels interminable for awhile. But once you find yourself on life’s mountain backside, you do realize you are rolling down hill to the graveyard that waits for us all.
And within this realization comes the knowledge and the gift that that will always be there, and to some degree I cannot even control when I land there, the only real control I have is this moment, right here, right now. This place where I exist in real time, where things in my life are wonderful and painful and awful and amazing. This place of ever changing peace and equanimity, where serenity ebbs and flows...again, still.
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