Clarity of purpose? Or something else?

Check marks on a list give me unreasonable levels of satisfaction. I can't help but think that I read so I can make lists of books that I should read. Every book that I finish gets a check mark. I love how the Audible apps lists books as finished. As a lonely teenager in a windy New Mexico military outpost, I had a list of Nintendo games that I had beaten. I wasn't a fan of sports games because there wasn't really a way to beat them. There was no final boss to defeat. Just beating the computer didn't have that thrill of accomplishment. There is a clarity of purpose in those games. The target is clear. The rules are clear. You just have to figure out how to make it through all the challenges. 

The sense of listlessness that I've been feeling may simply be the lack of clarity of purpose. What I am trying to do? I'm going in a direction towards a vague goal off in the distance, but it's too far to really be very motivating. I've felt this way before. Hell, I wrote about feeling this way last year. This is when I do things like look for another job, decide to apply to another graduate school, or develop some complex and utterly useless personal challenge. All of those tasks have an unambiguous goal and a clear path. You can see your progress and you know when you've succeeded. 

I don't really know what I want to accomplish professionally. I have never thought to give myself goals as a parent or as a husband. I'm not sure a simple goal will cut it these days. It's more about finding what makes me happy. I don't know what that is. Maybe that's what's missing.

Opportunities for meaning

The goal was 10 miles, but he only ran a little over 8 this morning. The waves of frustration and teeth gnashing that were expected never came. A goal was missed, but meeting that goal would have pushed his body too far. There is no point in inflicting injury just to achieve some arbitrary distance on a run. It was hot and humid. He had some water stashed along the route, but it was fairly deep into the run, near the halfway point. The run didn't go as planned, but he was able to get out there and run, push himself a little, and be in a condition where he was there for his family for the rest of the day and is ready to take on another run a few days from now. It didn't meet the plan, but it was a success.

Are there any retail transactions more irksome than buying a car? It takes weeks to shop for the right car, understand the options provided in the different models, and find a dealer who can deliver the right car in an acceptable color. Once that happens, you still have the pleasure of spending a couple of hours at the dealership while all of the various forms are filled out and approved. After all of that, you leave with a new car that loses a huge chunk of it's value the second you leave the lot and a new loan that will take years to pay off. Today it was about being there for her. Sure, he could have been negative and complained and been totally disengaged from the process, but he needed to support her through this challenging process. It wasn't about what he was feeling, it was about what she was experiencing. She needed to have support and reassurance. Being negative would just have added to the stress of an already stressful situation. Positive, reassuring, supportive. That's how things went today. And we're that much closer to finishing the aggravation of buying a new car.

The comments about thinking and reading aren't about thinking and reading. They're about how thinking and reading are a way to hide and disengage from the life that's happening right now. They represent a turning away. It's something that's all about me rather than something that is about us. And it's not that all of my life needs to be about us, but the balance is off. Too much living in my head and not enough living with the family. There is meaning all around us. We don't need to seek it internally or plot a course through life that will deliver us at the portal to profundity and enlightenment. You just need to look around you and engage with what we already possess. It's not about finding or getting more. 

Weighty issues hang in the balance...

Go to the beach or buy a new car. With that whole gay marriage thing resolved by judicial fiat and racial strife being mended by the erasure of critical historical moments (or core memories to put it in Pixar terms), this is the raging topic of the day in my small world. Both positions in this vigorous debate were dealt with earlier this year and felt satisfactorily resolved, but some open rooms in our favorite hotel and random car wonkiness (just a nail in a tire, but next time it could be something really dreadful) have put these two issues at odds in our happy home. Fun now (the beach trip would be this weekend, or This Weeknd to put it in hip-hop terms) or all the pain in the ass aggravation of actually buying a new car now with the longer term satisfaction of having a long simmering issue resolved are the issues under discussion. There is no easy answer. Maybe we can just do both?

Chasing my tail

Just sit here quietly and listen. I named my first Tumblr blog non-random Brownian motion. Oh you clever scientist you. Brownian motion IS random. To call it non-random is to call it something other than Brownian. Watching my focus zipping around from one thing to another feels like a random walk through my aspirations and status seeking goals. Take a look at that Primal Leadership book as a potential way to get that leadership program going? No, that feels too mercenary. Read some of The Recognitions? That's too demanding, besides, I just finished a book earlier tonight. How about Awaken the Giant Within? That's been dragging on forever. I can just focus on reading that and get it wrapped up. But is it worth the time to actually read it? It feels so New Bourgeois. I could write about that, the New Bourgeois, all of these productivity/entrepreneur/self-improvement bloggers who peddle the middle class aspirations of a new generation. That sounds demanding. Play Tetris? Bookworm? Why waste the time. I should do something more constructive and creative. I have all this energy just pent up. Maybe I should just go to bed. Or have another beer.

And that's how most of my uncommitted time gets used up. It just slips away as I spend most of it trying to figure out what I should do next. Should is the right word there. It's not what I WANT to do next. I'm not sure I even know what I would really want to do. It's what I SHOULD do. What would be the action that would garner me the most of what I think I want. Do I want to continue my search for the ideology that will fill my soul with meaning and give me a purpose and direction? My small little life with it's joys and pleasures can't be enough. There must be something more right? I should create something. I feel so trapped in a cage at work, running around and doing other people's bidding, this is my time to do what I need to do to feel fulfilled. Maybe I should figure out just what that would be before I get started on that kind of project. I need to do some research. What book should I read for that? And so the wheel goes around and around until I just give up and go to bed.

Idealized future state

Much of my life has been built around a the search for meaning through the pursuit of an idealized future. If I can just get a little closer to that ideal, life will saturate with meaning and significance. This is yet another youthful defense against the burden of emotions and vulnerability. The right college will bring meaning, the right graduate school experience, the right career, becoming who my wife needs in order to fulfill all of her needs. It's been a constant effort to mold myself to what is deemed significant and meaningful. The answers will find me if I can just get to where they can find me. 

This blog is one giant trail of my relentless pursuit of that one elusive thing. The whole premise of the URL, a set of New Year's Resolutions is nothing but a program to obtain some vision of an idealized future. All the bad stuff that I'm feeling now will sublimate to nothingness as I get closer and closer to a smaller waist, check another Dickens book off of my to be read list, or get accepted to law school. My pursuit of other career opportunities. My obsession with The Edge. All this groping for some sense of what I'm about, what I should be doing, what I can do to finally feel accepted and fulfilled. 

It's a futile effort. I've made progress towards the career goals that I thought would bring deeper meaning and purpose to my life. Work will never be the principle source of meaning in my life. The gap between what I wanted from work and what it actually provides has been nothing but an inexhaustible source of frustration and disappointment. The truth is that I have it awfully good where I am now. It's comfortable, but that's not a bad thing. There is no mystical office out there that will vanquish all of my doubts and provide a clear route to a deep and meaningful career. It's a job. It doesn't have to be devoid of significance, but every day at work doesn't need to be a spiritual quest either.

No book will provide the answers for how to live my life or where I can find meaning and fulfillment in every moment of my life. Books can expand my life, make it richer and more complex, but the key to that something else that I've always sought will never reveal itself, no matter how difficult the book is to read. There is no something else. It's all right here. Everything I need is already in my life, but I've been to busy filling my emotional needs and keeping the potential of any bad feelings away by distracting myself with silly little stunts that offer the illusion of getting that much closer to the idealized future. 

I don't need to become somebody else for my wife to love me more or to fulfill her emotional needs. I just need to be me. That's all that she's ever wanted from me. She wants to feel valuable and important, that she matters, that she's desired and wanted and pursued. I feel all of those things for her. It's just a matter of sharing that with her, being in the moment with her, hearing everything she says, not just with her voice, but with her body, her gestures, her actions. The answers aren't out there waiting for me to find them. They're inside each of us, trying to find their way out, but we have to work together to coax them out. I'm getting better, we're getting better. It's not about the ideal. It's about us.

It's not that a goal is unattainable, it's just hard

I was all set to write a weepy post where I chided myself for not making much progress on goals that I've had since I stated writing this blog. (I was thinking about getting in shape and publishing a research paper in case you were curious what long term goals I had in mind.) This feeling was prompted by some old posts that I reread while looking for my reading list from the first years of writing this blog. The topics that I was writing about then are still issues that I think about and deal with today. Weight loss, fitness, reading and buying books, getting a better sense of who I am and what I'm about. Where is the progress, where is the accomplishment?

The frustration really amped up when I read some of my comments on writing a research paper. I'm still working on that same paper! Shouldn't I have finished that by now? I say these things are important to me, but my status doesn't seem to change. I had this whole internal narrative about the appeal of unattainable goals playing in my head. Just as my self-loathing was really starting to ramp up, I challenged myself to take a look at my supposed failures from a different perspective.

I challenged this idea that I'm all about unattainable goals? What if I just choose to pursue activities that require lots of hard work, but haven't put in the effort needed to perform at a desired level? Hard goals are hard for a reason. They require consistent effort. I may face set backs. I might have to start all over again on some of them. Activities may conflict from time to time. I can't pursue all of them with the same level of intensity for an extended period of time. Hard activities are not fun. They require focus and commitment and sacrifice. I have a busy life. It's a fantastic, wonderful life. I make sure that the people who matter most to me have as much of me as they need. Should I really beat myself up if I slip a little bit in my workouts or avoid working on a research paper?

That's when I realized what is really bothering me. I haven't finished anything in awhile. I've finished a few books, but I need to finish Toll the Hounds. It's a huge book. I've made it a point to get through that series this year. Finishing it will feel like progress in a way that getting through some other books just can't match. That damn manuscript has been hanging over me for years. I did finish the version that I mentioned in that early blog post. I submitted it to a journal and it was rejected. I took a look at my paper after that rejection and realized that it needed to be totally reworked. I am close to finishing that reworked draft. There is tremendous progress on that project, but it doesn't feel like I've made any progress because the work remains unpublished.

I'm also still figuring out how to capture a sense of progress and achievement as a manager. I record and note all kinds of activities because I relish the sense of getting something done. When I was working at the bench, getting something done meant testing some samples or completing an analysis. Now getting something done means keeping a project on track over the course of months. I'm also not the one doing the work. That dilutes the sense of something getting done. I need to find ways to make my team's accomplishments more real. That will go a long way towards making me more satisfied with my work life.

Difficult feeling avoidance strategy

"Rather than learning how to tolerate difficult feelings, many of us have learned only to avoid them...[O]ur inclination is often to run from our emotions because they carry with them the threat of destruction. Indulging ourselves in thinking as a protective alternative, we try to avoid our fear by staying aloof of our feelings." Mark Epstein, in Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart

One sentence captures what I've been struggling to express for many, many months. This sentence slapped me when I read it this morning. I was stunned. To see in such plain terms made it's reality all the more stark. The undercurrent of fear in so many of pursuits, the hint of it that I had spotted last week, was made all the more clear.