It’s so easy to get off course in life. Even if you have a plan, a personal mission, a purpose you understand for your life, it’s so easy to get off course. Sometimes distractions slow you down, leaving you frustrated that you didn’t get done what you intended to—the old saying “When you are up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember that you are there to drain the swamp” comes to mind. And then sometimes you get so wrapped up in the distractions that you end up completely lost, not sure of what you are doing, where you are, or how you got there.
But there is another way it is easy to get lost, even if
there aren’t any distractions. It is often true that we can’t see or aim at the
ultimate (real) goal when we start a journey or project, so we identify
something we can see or keep track
of, which serves as a temporary or proxy goal until we see our real goal and
can focus on it. But we need to continually remind ourselves that the proxy is
not actually our goal. The most obvious of these is money, which it’s easy to take
as a proxy for a happy or fulfilling life—some money is important, but it’s far
too easy to trade away time, relationships, and other things that matter, for
more money that doesn’t. Money may be an obvious one, but life and literature
are full of examples of mis-used proxies.
I often think of this when out on our little Sunfish
sailboat. Not having any sophisticated instrumentation, we often choose another
boat on the horizon as the point off of which we steer, knowing it is in the
same direction as our destination. The problem with that strategy is that the
boat we are steering off of is not our destination: as we get closer, we need
to refocus on a different target. And if the other boat moves while we are
using it as a proxy, it actually becomes a false proxy and we will steer
ourselves off course from our real destination.
And sometimes, if we are
not careful, we may adopt proxies set by others, without realizing they are not
even proxies for goals we care about! I use Google Fit to help me measure
distances, speed, and other aspects of my exercise. As part of its program, the
app set some daily exercise targets and proxies for achieving physical health—I
had nothing to do with setting the levels, but just accepted them as they
appeared, without any research about appropriate targets for my age, weight,
etc. And yet, for some reason I feel happy if I hit them and disappointed if I
don’t!!! I don’t know whether those targets appropriate for me or not, and yet
it seems that I have accepted them as targets that will lead me to good health.
This seems a microcosm of accepting the goals the world set for us without any
input from us.
We need to thoughtfully choose our own goals, and proxies
where necessary, and revisit them periodically as we learn more about ourselves
or achieve some of them—and be careful not to mindlessly accept the goals and
proxies the world will place on us. Considering them can be fine, but they
should be part of an overall ongoing and thoughtful process if we want to reach
goals that really matter.
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