My entire life I have been on a quest of sorts. A quest to improve as a person, a quest to be “perfect”, a quest to move up in my career, get the bigger house and with each achievement I found that I was then setting the next goal to achieve. Goals are a good thing; they help to keep us focused and give us something to strive for. Right?
On a recent vacation, I had some time in nature, some time to sit in silence and reconnect with myself. In my contemplation, I realized that in many ways the need for better and my quest for achievement have also held me back.
As we travel along our journey to starting our family I have a single regret, which is that we hadn’t started sooner. Why hadn’t we? The reason is that we spent 11 years of our relationship putting our biggest desire aside, telling ourselves that we would start once we accomplished the next goal. The reality of it all is that a baby doesn’t need a big new house, doesn’t care what your job title is and can’t read all the degrees and education hanging on your wall.
How often do we all do this, put off something amazing or that will be life changing until we achieve that one next goal?
Now by no means am I advocating for throwing goals out the window, but I think we need to see them as an aspiration and not turn them into barriers to taking other steps in life. Goals don’t have to be linear, but rather similar to a vision board they can be intertwined and overlapping. We also need to take the time to celebrate achievements, and bask in the satisfaction of accomplishment.
On this vacation, in this moment of silence, I took the time to look back and celebrate all we have achieved as individuals and as a couple over the years. As the sun set on the rustling trees, I turned to R and simply said, “Our life is good”. With a warm smile, he reached out and took my hand and simply said, “It sure is”. Then without the need to talk about what would make it even better, or set that next goal, we sat in the silence together and took the time to embrace the fact that life truly is good.
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