Today's topic: goals. Goal: 1. The purpose toward which an endeavor is directed; an objective. 2. Sports a. The finish line of a race. b. A specified structure or zone into or over which players endeavor to advance a ball or puck. c. The score awarded for such an act. 3. Linguistics a. A noun or noun phrase referring to the place to which something moves. b. See patient (sense 2). Whenever you talk to people and at a certain point tell them what your dreams in life are they tend to smile understandingly and tell you how good it is to have goals. What they are probably meaning is more something like 'well that sounds really difficult but we hope you will succeed.' I've been thinking about those so called goals in life a lot lately. And wondering about how good it is to have them in the first place as I've now reached a point in my life where I don't see me achieving any or a whole lot of the goals I had, say, fifteen years ago. At all. That doesn't mean that I'm unhappy about the way my life is going so far, not at all, but there are most definitely times when I wished I took a slightly different path through life, because then I could or even would have reached some of these childhood dreams. This may sound a little pessimistic right now as I'm only thirty three years old now and there is hopefully still a lot of time on this earth ahead of me. And the tone of this post probably has something to do with the fact that since my job change I'm a bit too busy for comfort with a lot of things messing with my head. Life stuff, you know, like children for example. What do you tell them when the time comes? To set goals at will and pursue them for the rest of their life's? Or do you tell them to be modest about setting goals and carefully think them over so they have a better chance of achieving them in the future? I don't know yet. And now that I'm thinking about it ... If someone had told me, when I was a child, that the things I wanted in life were never going to happen, being the stubborn guy that I am, I probably wouldn't have believed them anyway ;-) So that wouldn't have done any good or prevented me from having this kind of dissolution now that I'm all grown up and stuff ... These kind of subjects are always tricky I guess and we'll probably never get the answer we want out of them. And you know what? That might just be the whole deal about goals. It can be a kind of support to grab hold off when your feeling a little down. 'Wait until I grow up, because then I will ... '. We need those thoughts I think, otherwise what's the whole point of us being here in the first place. I need to quit this topic or else I'm afraid I'll be loosing it. But it's stuff like this that keeps creeping up behind me when I have a few spare moments to think. Preferably when I've just gone to bed, waiting to fall asleep. Then is the most dangerous time of day for my head. It has nothing better to do than play all these 'what if' scenarios with my mind and it's getting increasingly better at it too sometimes. So ... what do you want to be when you grow up? :-)