What Do You Want From Life?

What do you want from life?
To kidnap an heiress
Or threaten her with a knife?
What do you want from life?
To get cable TV
And watch it every night?
(The Tubes)

What do you want from life?

Many (most?) of us just drift along. From one paycheck to another, one marginally satisfying job to another, one doomed personal relationship to another. The days and months and years slip past as if flipping through a magazine. A few pictures here and there might grab onto a flicker of attention, but the words on the pages blur together and might as well be in a language we can’t identify, let alone read.

Very common, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You can make a conscious effort to live in the moment. It can be something as simple as focusing on your breathing. Or practicing situational awareness of the little details of your surroundings. When you take your 100-pound puppy for a walk, does the neighbor three houses down have two trees in her front yard or three? Does that guy walking toward you have a kubotan in his right hand or is it a cell phone? Have raspberries started turning red on the bushes in the front yard of the brick house on the corner?

What’s that got to do with what I want from life?

Hold on Cletus, I’m getting to that.

It’s hard to know what you want, if you don’t know what you have. If your life is feeling mediocre, a big part of the reason for that might well be that you haven’t been paying attention to the little details of that life. Your spouse has been a bit pissy lately and you have no clue why? You didn’t get that promotion you were hoping for and have no idea why Alex got the offer rather than you? Your daughter’s having teenaged angst and you can’t tell her friend Shayna from her friend Shauna?

But simply living in the now and paying attention isn’t enough. And setting goals isn’t enough. I once had an acquaintance/friend who had the goal of being a millionaire by the time that he was 30. For all the good it did him, he succeeded. But he was in prison by the time he was 31.

If what you want is strong personal relationships, work at it. Actually listen to what people are saying to you. If listening is not a dead art, it’s on the gurney waiting for a transfusion. Do you want more money in your life for the things you can get with it or for the freedom to experience the things that money itself can’t buy?

Think long and hard about what you want. And be careful what you ask for; you might get it.

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