At the end of a recent standing call that I keep with a friend of mine, he tasked us both with coming back the next week with a list of goals for ourselves. Lest you think that this is unusual, it is not. He is the type of friend to give homework between our chats. Conversely, I am the type of friend to wait until 5 minutes before our next call to realize I’ve not thought about his homework since we hung up. Though I think that says less about the type of friend I am and more about the type of homework-assignee I am.
In those 5 minutes I jotted some notes about why I think setting goals is dumb (why commit yourself tomorrow with only today’s information?), and instead chose to write and share three directions I wanted to move in. Things I wanted more of in my life, and things that I wanted less of as a result. I stand by that reframing, but the things I wrote in the remaining minute and a half could just as easily have been found in a Panda Express fortune cookie.
Then, last week I read Hollywood, Ending, by fellow Indianapolis-import John Green. In the book, one of the main characters describes the “obstacle” she shares with another character as their mutual inability to disentangle what they want from what they are supposed to want. For the last few days this concept has followed me around, and I have found myself largely incapable of this disentanglement as well.
The signs keep pointing me towards: I want to know what I want.
I don’t suspect that this longing would get me much sympathy (which is a real bummer), if not for the fact that there are many people whose first entry into such a collection of wants would be a tad closer to a need, then for the fact that a large contributor to my not knowing what I want is my already having much of what could be wanted. I graduated college at 22, sold my first company at 24, married my best friend at 25, bought a house at 26, and besides, at 27, you aren’t-even-supposed-to-know-what-you-want-yet. It does strike me though, looking around, that many folks quite a bit my senior also haven’t got the damnedest clue what it is that they want, and I very much wish to avoid sliding into a prolonged state of wanting nothing. To be human is to want.
So, this is the homework that I am assigning myself: In the next 200 days, publish 100 essays, 500 words or less, about the things that I want.