Dispatches from the middle

And I’m back. Mused and faffed my way through close to 30 days, which isn’t half bad considering, but fell of the wagon at the end. Such is life. There shall be much more musing and faffing to come! In fact, I’ve been thinking about goals lately. The word “goal” always takes me back to Grade 5. Our teacher was goal-oriented to the point of being goal-obsessed. We were constantly writing out lists of goals for ourselves and pasting them on the walls or sticking them to our desks. Every time I opened my desk, I was treated to a reminder of what I “should” be doing and probably wasn’t hugely enthusiastic about (being 9 or 10 years old, the only goal I took seriously at all was convincing my parents to get me a pony). I was always a good student and inevitably met the teacher-inflicted goals without too much trouble, but for some reason, they engendered a sense of inadequacy, and I came to hate goals with a passion.

In fact, I refused to even think about having goals until well into my 20’s. “Goals” weaseled their way back into my life in the form of crazy schemes. Before I moved to Munich in 2005, I’d run 2 marathons – Edmonton and Calgary. It was slowly dawning on me that this was something I was going to be doing for a very long time, so I looked up the Munich marathon. Turns out it took place a couple days after my arrival, so I signed up…and continued googling. By the time I was done with the googling, I’d come up with a plan that would have me running six marathons in various locations all over Europe over the course of my year-long stay in Germany. A goal, perhaps? Now, I’d never been to any of these places and I had no idea whether I could run that much in a year, so it was more of a crazy scheme than a goal in the sense Mrs. Randall would have had me understand, but it was something I’d cooked up for myself to do and was very excited about.

In the end, I ran a slightly different set of marathons than I’d originally planned (I made a some great friends at the Lisbon marathon and ended up traveling to races with them throughout the year), one turned into a triathlon, and a bunch of unplanned half-marathons got thrown into the mix, but in so far as it was an amazing year of travel and running that never would have happened without the initial scheme, I’d say I “achieved” my goal.

I also decided then and there that plans and goals need to be flexible, especially big ones. Plans change. Ideas change. Circumstances and desires change. Personally, I like having grand ideas to aspire to and work towards, though I know things rarely work out exactly as one imagines they will. I also like having sets of smaller goals to guide my efforts in the short term – my birthday resolutions are still posted on the wall above my desk – but these change too. Skydiving has been successfully replaced by paragliding, the marathon has been replaced by running faster half-marathons, which is working like a charm, and the poem per week resolution has been usurped by blogging. But it all functions to move me in the same general direction – well enough defined that it guides and motivates, but flexible enough to allow for life to be life. It takes the pressure off. Goals are great. Just don’t allow them to “set”. Bend them and stretch them, keep them close and keep them malleable so they can grow with you.

The next crazy scheme is still in its infancy, so I can’t share much of substance yet, but it will hopefully provide some blog material soon!