I realized (just last night) that in some cases, goal-orientedness is overrated.
I am basically a goal-oriented person. When I love things, I generally love them passionately and when I work on something, I work on it with the focus and strength of a bull, because I set goals for myself to make it fun. Not just fun, I like to see tangible results. Believe me, I am still (inherently) the laziest person you will find, but the goals make me do things, and I generally try my best and find shortcuts at every step. :-) Anyway, getting back from the digression... I work on things a bit obsessively (enjoying it thoroughly though), and also, I am not used to sticking to a fixed schedule. I usually freely choose to do things whenever I like to do them...
However, now with my little boy, the "time for myself" is largely largely reduced, and at a point I found myself getting restless about my goals. I felt as if I was running very hard, only on a treadmill, so that I would exhaust a lot of energy running, but would stay in the same place forever! I said exactly this to my husband last night.
As always, I also got introspective as I was talking to him. I was making a list of things I wanted to do this year. I am not going to share the entire list here, but naturally one of them was to explore a certain theme/aspect in painting. I was complaining about how little time I spend painting lately. Then to assess my statement, I thought about how many paintings I had done since my son's birth. The number was 6. So it's six in roughly a year, which I felt was a good number... and then I wondered what the hell I was complaining about...My husband and my parents have always told me that I am too hard on myself, and I see now that that might be true...
Once you start getting restless, the goals are no longer fun. And why have such strict timelines on life goals? I really think sometimes goal-orientedness is overrated, or perhaps it's the more than necessary aggressiveness about timelines. When it comes to some things, you just need to take it slow and explore and derive fun from that rather than from instant results.
That said, when it comes to certain things, my word for this year is going to be explore, explore, explore, rather than results, results, results. Though I have always enjoyed the "process" even though I have had results in my vision all the time, now I will have to discover a way to enjoy the process either without constant reminders to self about the results, or with coming to terms with the process being slower than earlier. Heck, the kid is the biggest blessing I could've ever asked for.
Why not bask in our blessings, just a little bit...?
2 comments:
Couldn't agree more! Though I came from the other extreme. I used to believe that setting goals takes the fun out of everything. I worked hard and enjoyed whatever I did but kept no goals - but that also led me to jump around aimlessly from thing to thing. But I know now that there's a happy medium somewhere. It's still a struggle for me to set definite goals and stick to them. But I'm much better at it now than 10 years ago.
Good way of putting it:"happy medium", isn't that what we're all struggling for...!
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