On My Goals
Right now, I’m not really certain of what they are, but I’ve started making progress in the field of discovering them, which I find really exciting. As of today, I’ve ended a month-long trip with friends through parts of Europe, which for the most part was a real blast. No matter my feelings in the moment, I did my best to remind myself that this experience in its own right was something I would have begged for at any other point in my life, and that ought not be taken for granted. But with that chunk of time now cashed in, I have to start thinking about what comes next.
I’m particularly fortunate in this regard. It is currently the end of June 2022, the halfway point of the year, and I have the rest of it more or less planned out. Given how nebulous everything in my life became when I left university earlier this year, I am extremely grateful to have as much clarity about my future as I do. A lot of it has taken pushing from outside parties whose importance is not to be understated, but the time for me to take more control of my life is long overdue. Simply put, I need to be more proactive.
There is a trap I have to be careful not to let catch me when ‘planning’ for the future. It’s a favourite of my subconscious, and involves simply putting off giving the future any real thought, the sole justification being that things will happen before then that will push me in a certain direction. The particularly dangerous part of this mindset is that it is, in part, true. Events will take place in the next six months that will, to whatever degree, influence what choices I am free to make or would even think to make about my future, but this should by no means predicate an aversion to forward-thinking.
So, that brings me to what I’m doing now. This is all in the early stages, and this is a concept about which I have thought for only a week or two now. But the exciting thing, again, is that I’m approaching it in a way I honestly never thought to before. Instead of looking at what is simply available to me to do at a given point in time, I am beginning to decipher what it is I want to be doing, or some checkpoints I want to hit. From there, it’s a slow but satisfying process of figuring out all of the things that need to be true for that to happen. Before I knew it, I had a series of thoughts branching out into ideas and interesting exciting prospects.
I know what the next step has to be. For my own sake, I need to make this tangible. By that, I mean to get it out of my hand and in some physical form. Essentially, I need to make it more difficult to ignore, and simpler to pick up again. As I am writing this I am too writing a note on my hand to do just that as soon as I get to my destination on this bus journey from Paris. As exciting as it is to me in this moment, I have the typical attention span of someone my age, which is to say, almost none at all. I have to sustain this, and treat it with the appropriate level of gravity, but for my sake, also try to keep it interesting.