Small goals

Originally published on Medium on Dec 11, 2016

I floated up to the surface of sleep this morning, the sensation was of a dead body that had been poorly weighted and had drifted loose. It was still dark, I didn’t want to wake up, didn’t want to go to work. I realized that I was feeling the desire for an off-switch again, succumbing to that wake-me-when-it’s-over feeling, and I flashed back to the post I wrote a couple of months ago about choosing to live.

I wrote that piece when I wasn’t required to be in a corporate office every weekday, when I was working for a reason and for an environmental non-profit that I loved, and I had a lot of space between things. Now I spend my days working at the glacial pace of a huge company, and I feel restless. I feel stuck.

When I finally got up and sat down to do my morning writing, I realized that I need to define a life worth living, and how I intend to get there. We may not have choice about everything in our lives (however, I would argue that there’s more choice than most people imagine), but we can choose what we do with it, and how. We need to continue choosing, over and over.

If you can’t leave your job, do something for 20 minutes a day that gets you closer to the life you want. Make lists of goals, then break those down into smaller and smaller goals until they are manageable. Do one a day, and check it off the list. You may find that hour a day adding up, and becoming more. Check in quarterly. Adjust as needed.

Starting small is the ONLY way anything happens because nothing happens all at once. It is physically impossible to complete something at the same time as you begin it. Step by step… the important thing is to start somewhere.