Goals and Time

I used to have both. I can no longer call either one mine. This is just another step in the process, I assure myself, and it's completely true, and ok. Actually I should be fair and accurate. My goals and time have changed, not disappeared. My goals are now babbling on the couch next to me, and that is, by the way, where "my" time is now too. Is that a matter of convenience that everything I used to define myself is now a small person who goes through many many diapers a day? I think maybe yes. It is quite convenient. At least this way there is no doubt.

Goals are easy to define. You just decide where you want to be in the next 2, 5, 10 years and boom, there's a set of goals. Time is just as easy, you either have it or not. What you do with your time has always been your business right? Not anymore, for me anyway. My family, as awesome as they are, have come forward and helped me with Joy by taking her periodically so I have some time to do what I want to do. But it's not MY time, is it? Not really. It's borrowed time, or more accurately gifted time. So, by some measure it's mine but technically, if not for my family, I would not have it.

So that takes me down a road I had not expected. When someone gives you a shirt for Christmas or a tool for your birthday, you kind of expected to wear it, or use it as it was designed to. It's not good form to take a perfectly new shirt and use is as oil rags, or a brand new tool and sell it for scrap metal. A few years down the road, when it starts to recede from everyone's memory, it's ok to do whatever you want with it. But for the first few years, you have to abide by the commonly accepted protocols. What is an acceptable usage of this time I have? Well I have to be honest, I'm being pretty damned selfish with it. I'm fairly defensive of "my" time. I've been using it messing around in the garage, working on trucks and motorcycles, and occasionally, the house. I feel a bit guilty, but I think if I don't do something for myself, I might go batty. So I consider this an ounce of prevention. Definitely worth some pounds of cure.

So if my goals and time are now either deflected or not mine anymore, how do I define myself? That's easy. My goals are simple, I want my daughter to grow up and be happy and healthy, and I spend almost all my time working to that end. That's a noble goal, so I define myself as noble. If a toolmaker is the noblest profession, a parent has to be a close second.

I've learned through this process that my need for goals and time has largely been a response to an outside force of some kind. I've had goals because society expects me to. I've had time to pursue my goals. Don't get me wrong, I liked my goals and enjoyed the pursuit. But it was the joy of the hunt that kept me in the game for the most part, not the goals themselves. Why is that? I believe it is because we are results driven human beings. We look for a particular result, aim for it, and work our asses off to get there. What happens when you get there though? Do you sit on that previously driven ass and enjoy the fruits of your labors? NAH. You keep going, don't you? You keep aiming for goals until you create one that cannot be hit, and you're happy. You're happy because of the joy of the hunt, not the goal itself. Goals, in fact, can make one unhappy by some arguments. In the end, if you hit all your goals, you have nothing to work towards. That sounds like an incredibly empty feeling to me.

Up until a few weeks ago, my goals were to work up at the mine in Leadville kinda doing paltry IT support stuff, working on my Cisco certifications, and eventually landing a better job down in the front range when baby was going to be a little bigger, more active, and more wanting of activities. I figured I could land that better job because the economy might have improved and I would have some real experience and be marketable. Then and only then would I finally be happy. Why did I choose the IT field versus any of the other myriad of fields I actually had experience in? At some level because it was mysterious and unobtainable. I would never get there. It was never really going to happen for me, so I pursued it like a dog chasing a rabbit. A big rabbit that ran real fast. Might I have got there eventually? Sure. I'm quite certain I would have. I mean, there are very few goals I've actually wanted and never achieved, and this would be no different, I'm sure of it. I would be competing for jobs with people half my age, fresher education (my masters in IS is 10 years old already), etc etc but I would get there eventually. Then what? Where from there? I'm at the brass ring, I'm there. Well, there's always the next echelon isn't there? There's management (yuck), engineering (I don't have the patience), design (I don't have a thread of creativity in me), sales (umm NO), or super geek. It would seem like my only option would be to master some technology(s), pigeonhole myself into it (them), and eventually become obsolete. Kinda like what I did to my communications career. It took about 10 years or so but it could be done again.

I joke from time to time with a friend of mine who is about my age, about what we want to be when we grow up. It sounds scary but it's true, I'm actually still trying to nail that one down. So, maybe it's actually refreshing to have my goals greatly simplified for me. It kind of takes the pressure off. Now my goals are simple, my job is simple, my life is simple. Maybe this hiatus will allow me to do a reset. Maybe in a month or so, I'll have new goals, a new idea of what the perfect life actually is, and maybe I'll be living it.