Goals

Can you rest in the comfort of not having reached your goal… yet?Recently I have noticed how much we are focused on achieving formal goals in our future. Let’s say you aiming to be an astronaut. Your goal is set by the official recognition as an astronaut at a specific date. And so you’ve created a path between where you are right now and where you want to go.  Instantly we begin comparing the now with the goal we have not yet achieved. We don’t think of ourselves as ‘training to be an astronaut’, but we think of ourselves as ‘not yet an astronaut’.

What happens is that we get focused on the future goal. We see only what is missing, the rest of the way and that we are not there yet. It can be quite frustrating, if we allow it to be.

I recall this feeling from growing up. My parents have always meant well and wanted my sisters and me to be successful. I put pressure on myself, because I thought ‘successful’ is something I could only be in the future. I thought I would one day have a job and someone would come to my office with a certificate and say ‘Congratulations, Clemens. You are now officially successful.’ It doesn’t happen that way.

With time I realized that goals are great to set a direction, but that I could be successful at any given moment in time. I realized that the path we choose and how we walk it are part of the achievement. I had to learn to be proud of my past achievements and rest comfortably in the state of ‘not yet’.

How is the patience and level of comfort in the ‘not yet’-state? Can you appreciate that present moment? Can you embrace the ‘not yet astronaut’ – weightless in the anywhere?