When Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for three years.

[cjsmith]

(A tip of the hat to Tom Lehrer for the title.) This is yet another comment I posted elsewhere first.

The other day I had a minor bout of what-have-I-done-with-my-life. I get those from time to time. I figured we all do, especially around birthday time! I asked my beloved whether he ever got those. He said no.

No? Hmm.

Turns out when he was little he had goals. Go to MIT, start a high tech company. He did them. Check. Done!

(Now he has a similar feeling of "where do I go from here?" So from this moment on, we're in the same boat, in a way.)

Once he said that I realized something. When I was a child I didn't have goals. I had dreams. Most of those dreams I discarded for very sane reasons, many of them having to do with being a girl. (No Blue Angels for me.) But goals and dreams are different. Dreams are safe because you don't have to do anything; you don't have to risk failure. I never got around to making goals, because enough of my dreams simply weren't workable. I learned early that it was a bad idea to risk. (There's the difference between Rob's situation and mine. He knows he can achieve big goals. I "know" I can't.)

Now I have a bunch of discarded broken dreams, no goals achieved, and no one to blame for it but Mom myself. (Sure, Mom broke a few of my dreams, but I can't blame her for being right. And it wasn't her job to come up with goals.) Veddy intedesting!

I still have dreams. I haven't fully let go of "be an astronaut", but of course that one's got to go. I'm 38 in three days and I have multiple chronic pain conditions. It's a non-starter. But there are other dreams I could turn into goals...

...if I had the courage. It'll take courage. It was painful enough when all the dreams broke; how much more will it hurt when I try for a goal?

But if I don't find that courage, all I'll have in another 37 years is discarded dreams and no one to blame for it but me. Right? RIGHT!

Comments

[eichin.livejournal.com]

I'm probably a little more in Rob's camp - I did, after all, retire 5 years ago, before discovering that I'm just not any good at that, and I need to feel useful. And I went from wanting to be an auto mechanic, to astronaut, to having glasses by around age 10, so while I'm still a space geek, doing the flying has been out of the picture forever. (The only thing that's kept me from sending Burt Rutan my resume has been that I can't think of any way I could be *useful* to his efforts - I'm still planning a pilgrimage to Mojave Spaceport next year some time, though :-) Still, the combination of "commercial space access" and vision correction surgery have both strongly drawn my attention.

But I think you've nailed it with "knowing" what you can achieve. I don't think about whether I *can* do any technical thing that interests me - I think about whether I can make the time and be organized about it. That's what I make lists for. It certainly helps that I don't generally have physical limitations getting in the way - not that I don't have the limits, I'm overweight and have bad knees, it's just that for things where those matter, *boredom* usually kicks in much sooner than pain, so it doesn't get in the way. (Another way to put it - it's not that I can't imagine finishing a marathon, I can't imagine *starting* one :-) But it means I haven't ever been swatted down by such things, which probably makes a big difference. Maybe it helps a bit to focus on things accomplished, in terms of "yeah, I want more of that", than predicted failure?

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

Now that you mention this, I don't think much about whether I can achieve something technical. Mostly I think about whether I'm willing to spend my time that way. Similar with learning foreign languages.

But any project or goal involving other human beings hinges, at least in part, on their reactions to me or to my work. Other people's reactions are not things I can control. And anything involving my physical body is a loss at this point; I can't control that either.

But it means I haven't ever been swatted down by such things, which probably makes a big difference. Maybe it helps a bit to focus on things accomplished, in terms of "yeah, I want more of that", than predicted failure?

Probably. O'course, previous minor successes involved standing up; I am not (yet) able to focus on those without seeing mainly my current limitations. Sadly, I'm not sure there's much I perceive as "worth doing" that involves my brain and *not* my body and *no* other people. That's worth some brainstorming.