Living With Dots and Without Goals

The Art of Living With Dots and Without Goals

I taught a course about goal setting last year. I created some new material for it and really got into the subject. The underlying assumption in the two-morning class was that you needed to focus if you wanted to get somewhere, do something, be something, or have something. Then we also talked about how to make your goals happen. In the end we’d parsed life into key sectors, set goals in each area five different ways, identified critical success factors, and aimed everyone at building action plans. The course got good reviews but I’ll never know whether anyone accomplished what they set out.

Today, I’m drawn to just the opposite – the subject of living “goal-less.” Not so that one falls into sloth and depravity for lack of direction, but rather because I find that in leaving at least a part of my life unscripted and unplanned, wonderful things happen. This is more in keeping with eastern philosophers.

One sixth-century Chinese poet captured part of what I’m trying to say this way:

Taking pleasure in Tao is calming,
Wandering free and easy in reality.
No action and nothing to attain,
Relying on nothing, manifesting naturally.

A more recent philosopher put it this way; “A goal-less, plan-less way of being in the world becomes the canvas upon which lack of self-centered striving paints a master drawing.”

In Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book, Wherever You Go There You Are, he strongly advocates a goal-less approach to mediation and prayer, and by following his logic, the study of the spiritual path. The path is the sought after end and you find the path without aim, intent or driven purpose.
Could that same approach be applied to other areas of one’s life?

Are we such control freaks that we have to set goals for and manager every minute of our existence – a very western view.
In reflecting back, some of the greatest pleasures in my life came from an unplanned, unscripted often surprising moment: a new job that proved to be extraordinary and life changing; a flight back home up the east coast during which an eclipse of the moon unfolded right in front of my cockpit window; a speaking engagement agreed to in a weak moment that changed the lives of some attendees – and in turn gave me great satisfaction; a chance encounter that created a deep, long-lasting and intense intimacy in a relationship. I could go on yet I know you can think of your own list.

Often, we beat ourselves up for not being on some hardened path. We set our goals and then rue each day we don’t do something substantive in achieving them. Yet in that day some great things happened if we were awake enough to “see”.
What we’re looking for is the unscripted “dot”, to build on some remarks Steve Jobs made in a commencement speech a couple of years ago.

When Jobs dropped out of college he kicked around aimlessly and started taking a wide variety of courses on a ‘drop in’ basis - just things that seemed to interest him at the time with no grand plan or goal. Not too many years later it turned out he’d sampled just the right mix of classes to lay the foundation for what later became Apple Computer, and, through imitation, Microsoft. One of his comments at the commencement was, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards.” “You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

So be an artist. Start each day with a blank canvas and some goal-less time to just follow the breeze – to be open to new opportunities and possibilities. They’ll find you; you don’t have to go looking for them. Allow the Universe to deliver you some unscripted ‘dots’ on that canvas and trust that later they’ll connect.

Namasté

This newsletter is to stimulate your spiritual thinking in the hope that it will contribute to your spiritual growth. The essays are not meant to be complete treatises on the subject, only short papers to stimulate your thinking. The author invites your comments and critiques by reply e-mail to bob@futuremoons.com.