Goals

In the last couple of weeks, it’s been driven home to me how little control I have over my own life. Decisions that other people make, lives other people have lived, things other people say – all of them impact my life, and I have no control over it at all. Even if I bear no direct responsibility or have no power in the situation, the waves from the actions and judgments of others ripple out into the pool of life and rock my little canoe. I guess that’s just the way life is.

It seems to me that I can have two responses to this. One is to try to escape from the effects of others. I can hide in my computer and play my games or surf the net. I can read books until 3:00 am and then go to work with only two hours of sleep. I can eat incorrectly and drug myself out on sugar and carbs. I can sleep my life away.

This, to be honest, is my normal response when I feel helpless and my life seems to be out of my control. I float away and wake up later to realize that another year is gone. But now quite a bit of my life has floated down that stream and soon there won’t be that many years left for me to wake up.

Plus it doesn’t work anyway. I may want to float away, I may wish I could drift, but the waves still rock me. And I accomplish nothing.

The other response is to control what I can. And what I can control are my own actions and reactions. I can try to take my life back.

So I’m trying to set some clear-cut goals. I’ve set goals before, and even met a few of them, but I’ve never approached my goals as strategies for my life. I’m going to try to do that – I’m going to try to know what I want to do, why I want to do it, and how I’m going to implement it.

The implementation part is the bitch, because drifting away on my little canoe seems to be so much easier.

Even though it’s really not.

But I don’t want my life to drift away from me anymore. I don’t want to wake up in 2012 and realize all I have to show for the last couple of months is a well developed Sim.

I’d rather have a well-developed Betsy instead.

So I guess that means I’ll be setting some clearly defined and well-thought-out goals.

God help me.