goals and the creation thereof

//image//

I love it when people say they are Goal Oriented. I feel that it's almost like saying "I need food to live" or "Puppies are cute." Duh. Aren't we all goal oriented? Aren't we all driven by the results and rewards that signify the end of a task? Maybe it's not so simple.

As much as I hate to admit that I'm wrong, it is possible in this instance that I have been the opposite of right. That is to say, lately I've been singing a different tune. Because it turns out that I, in fact, am selectively goal oriented. Let's just say that the super amazing tattoo I planned in the spring, told everyone and their freaking grandmother I was getting, and have been, airquote, saving money for, end airquote, ever since is no closer to happening now than it was in March. I started out with $350 and as of right now I have about $23.75 in the old piggy bank. So, clearly that goal has not motivated me. On the other hand, I climbed for the first time in silks this week. Up and down once on both sides, which, side note, makes me a Warrior Princess. But more on my Warrior Princessdom another time. The point is that I had a specific goal: Climb That Damn Silk. And I accomplished it simply through the motivation of the effect of the effort. My lizard brain told me, "Try hard, climb silk. Do not try hard, do not climb silk. Me want to climb silk." So I went to classes, revived my yoga membership, tried as hard as my jiggly white ass could try, and Climbed That Damn Silk.

What was my point again?

Goals - they're tricky. Last year, I started a little blog thing that I called "A Year of 25." The point was to make twenty-five super cute and/or trendy goals and update my breath-baited readers as I checked them off one by one. I'm pretty sure that I was trying to be Elsie Larson at the time. But I'm not Elise Larson and I crossed nothing off that list that I wouldn't have anyway without an official "goal." Yet, I tried again this year, thinking, "All the cool bloggers have goal lists! I'll be a looooooser if I don't!" How many of those have I accomplished? Two, and one only through purposeless inaction ("Resist cutting hair," I like to aim high.)

In all of this, I think my real failure was inorganically creating goals in order to fit into some construction of a productive, happy person that I so easily formed from reading blogs and looking at pictures of people with apparently productive, happy lives. People like Elise seem so passionate and driven, and I, well, work at a library and eat a lot of pizza.

The takeaway?

If there's anything that I have learned in my past three years of blogging/26 years of life, it's that passion can't be manufactured. We've got to just throw ourselves in the way of things that inspire us and maybe, just maybe, something will stick. When I started reading Austin Eavesdropper, I was bored with my life and silks seemed like a blast.

And now I'm climbing.