Tag: goals

Categories
life

Running: Milestone 1

I had to take some time off running for a bit when I got sick, but I got back on my training schedule and met a milestone today. Saturday I had a 4 mile workout which is a normal distance so far. Today was another 4 miler but unlike every previous run I did not walk a single step.

When I had done three mile workouts I was running 2 1/2 miles and then walking for a bit before finishing at a run. When I started 4 milers I ran 3 or 3 1/4 then walked and then finished running.

On Saturday I increased my pace and it wore me out. That is why today’s run was so surprising. I ran at the faster pace – about the pace I hope to run for my marathon. I decided early in the run to go at least 3 1/4 miles before walking.

At about 2 1/2 miles I decided not to walk before 3 1/2 miles.

At 3 miles I thought, “I could possibly run the whole distance.”

At the 3 1/4 mile mark I committed to run the whole way. The really amazing thing was that at 4 miles I still had energy. I’m sure I could have gone another 1/4 mile without walking.

Categories
life

Running

I am currently trying to define what I want in my life. It’s like having a fresh start because I have not felt like I was going anywhere so I can pick any direction that I want. As I reviewed some old goals that I have had from various times in my life and decided which of those goals to begin pursuing in earnest. One of those goals that has been floating in the back of my mind for nearly half my life is to run a marathon one day. As I face this fresh start I thought about that goal and reasoned that you can’t just decide one day to run a marathon and then run it the next day. That goal requires that you start training months in advance. With that in mind I finally decided that I might as well start running so that I will be prepared when I am ready to select a marathon and run it.

Having made that decision – today marks my first run. It was raining and cool and generally the kind of weather that nobody runs in unless they are committed to running. In the face of all that I decided that I had better run today or else I would find a new excuse to procrastinate tomorrow. I ran a short route today – three miles. I did slightly better than I had planned (I had planned a very conservative pace) and based on today’s run I think I am going to set a goal to finish the marathon, when I get to that point, in four hours.

My younger brother will laugh when he learns that I have decided to take up running. He was an avid runner back in the day – before he rediscovered “the one true sport.” Of course he can’t complain that I have taken up running again considering that he recently convinced his wife to start running.

Categories
life

Clarification

Thanks to the astute observations of a friend, I have refined my perspective on my current frustration. I do have a personality. The one he described sounds very familiar to me. The fact that my personality may easily go unnoticed in crowded situations does not bother me. I’m glad to know that it could be noticed in individual interactions. The problem I face is that I have become buried by the minutia of my own life. I seem to have forgotten how to be myself and see the strengths of my personality. Perhaps it is a touch of insecurity at the annoyance of not finding a job as fast as I had hoped. That insecurity is magnified by the fact that the vast majority of job descriptions I find are looking for “6 to 8 years experience with increasing responsibilities” etc. Unfortunately some of us do not have that many years experience, but we still have to feed our families.

Regardless of how buried I had become there is also the fact that I have been undergoing an internal transformation over the last year and I am still trying to make sense of the implications of the changes I have chosen to make. I hope that the end result will be a greater sense of focus and direction in all areas of my life.

As for the job – I have to be clear if this is the impression my previous posts had left:

I hope I’m wrong, but reading between the lines it sounds as though you feel that having a high profile or highly paid or publicly perceived as “important” job is more substantial than simply doing your best to be honest and dutiful at whatever you do.

I do not care about the wages (so long as I can support my family) or how onlookers might view the job I hold. I mean only that I cannot be content doing a job where I have nothing unique to contribute. If every other person at the company can do the job that I have been given, then why am I there? If I am in a company where I am allowed to give my input, rather than just follow the prescribed process and churn out the desired product, then I consider that substantial. I have had (and enjoyed) jobs delivering dry cleaning and spraying pesticides where I had the opportunity to do more than just “the job.” I just want to find another opportunity where I can feel that I am making a useful contribution rather than just being an interchangeable cog in the mechanisms of the company commerce.

Categories
life politics

Personality II

Ever since I recognized my lack of personality I have been thinking about how that came to be. My first thought was that being highly introverted plays a part in it. I was thinking of a way to say that without implying that introverts lack personality generally but then I talked to Laura about it and she convinced me that it is possible for extroverts to lack personality as well – so my introversion is not a cause.

There is a difference between an extrovert without personality and an introvert without personality. An extrovert without personality is a chameleon matching the social climate around them. An introvert without personality is like the invisible man – going undetected in social settings. I have also begin to think of it as being something of an emotional albino – lacking any pigment of personality.

The question I am trying to resolve in my mind is, have I always been without personality or have I shed my personality. If I shed it – why? when? and how? If I have always been without it, why? Personally I lean towards having shed my innate personality. I have no hobbies, or substantial aspirations. My current goal is to get a job because I have to. That probably sounds really pathetic, but the truth is that I doubt my ability to be hired to do anything that will hold my interest. Everything that might set me apart from other people and make me interesting has been labeled (by me) unimportant.

Perhaps I have found something. I do have desires, but they seem to be so far outside the reach of my opportunities. I would like to make a difference in how we approach and manage education in this country, especially among our youth. I would like to make a difference in my community by making my voice heard about ways that we can make it an even better place to live than it is already. How can I do these things when nobody would listen to me.

Even if people would listen to me I am so caught up in trying to survive that I have no energy left after working full-time (back when I was) to expend the time and energy trying to make my ideas heard. The only way I could see to do both would be to get a job where I could work on some of those things as part of my work. Who would hire me to do that? Getting elected to an appropriate position is the only other way (besides being hired) to spend my time doing those things. I think it is patently obvious that getting a socially invisible person elected to any office is as likely as getting a squirrel to win the Kentucky Derby.

That is enough for now. I expect this is a theme I will follow while I try to unravel this mystery.

Categories
life

Gardening Problem

I face a little problem with my garden. Having extra time today, I finally got around to starting to clean out my garden. I know it’s a bit early in the season right now, but the bugs have been getting to some of my plants and I need to make some changes in preparation for next year so I’m starting early.

I started by harvesting the carrots that had not been looking promising early in the season. Now the carrots have taken off so that in many places there is virtually no dirt between the carrots. They are big and beautiful and too numerous to eat all of them soon. I pulled out the broccoli plants since I already have more broccoli than I can eat. I pulled up the potatoes. I have been wondering about them all year since I could see that the plants grew, but I could only guess at how well the potatoes were coming on. I don’t remember having much success with potatoes in our family garden when I was growing up so I was not sure what our chances would be. We got lots of potatoes – even if you don’t count the ones that got sliced by the shovel as I dug up the dirt after removing the plants to find any potatoes I had missed. We also removed all our squash plants but there was little fruit left to harvest there because we had already taken most of it in. The squash plants had been the hardest hit by our bug problem.

So what’s my gardening problem? I can’t possibly eat everything I picked today unless I learn how to store things over the winter. I know it can be done because people have lived for centuries without refrigeration or global produce shipping. The problem is I am not exactly sure how to do it since we live in an age where most people live week to week between trips to the grocery store rather than working all summer to live over the winter on the produce you saved from your harvest.

You may ask why it matters since I can always go buy food at the store. The answer is that I have a goal to one day learn how to live entirely off my garden. I hope it never becomes necessary, but I would like to have that skill so that I can better understand and appreciate our modern lifestyle. Storing the produce of my garden over the winter is one step towards that goal.

Categories
life

Stifled, Stiphled, Ctiphl’d

I have been struggling for some time now feeling that life did not allow for me to do the things that I would like to do.

All I ask out of life is the opportunity to be a good father and to do something useful with the remainder of my life. I have the opportunity to be a good father, but the remainder of my life seems to be stuck in the daily grind of doing something without purpose which will pay the bills. It’s not that the work is bad, but it makes no use of any talent of mine and accomplishes nothing which would be considered an improvement in society.

If my goals were different – perhaps if all I wanted to do was to be a good father and to not worry about how to pay my bills – then this job would be fine. When my goals include doing work that would be of benefit to other people then this does not cut it. The thing that really galls me about being stuck in this merry-go-round of purposeless mediocrity is that I am convinced that no matter what line of productive work I chose there should be some opportunity to do it for some beneficial purpose. If I were in some line of work as generic as accounting, I could do it for a non-profit or charitable organization which focused on a cause I believed in. If my talent were to be a business owner, I could use my business to help others. I could perhaps employ young people who needed work or experience.

The point is that I believe that I could work in my current profession and feel that I was doing some good – unfortunately my current job is not such a position.

That is why I feel stifled enough to need to make up new spellings of the word.

Categories
meta

Blog, Journal, or Both

I am not new to blogging, but in some ways I am blogging from a new angle. On previous blogs I was posting enough to maintain three blogs and often posted multiple times each day. Since I have started this blog, I have managed to post every day so far. Last night I began to ask myself, “What do I want for this blog? Do I want to commit to posting every day?”

I like posting every day, and I hope to continue that, but I’m not sure how strong the commitment is at this point.

For me, there are a variety of purposes that a blog can serve. I have seen them used as a means of keeping in touch with distant friends and relatives. I have seen them used as journals as much as any locked diary. I have seen them used as a creative outlet to practice writing. I have seen them used as an outlet to push an ideological agenda. I have seen them used as a forum for publishing ideas and getting feedback from professional colleagues. The question I am asking myself is, what purpose do I want this blog to fill?

I know I want it as a way of communicating my thoughts and perspectives so that other people can see what I think and what I think about. I have a desire to keep a consistent journal, but do I want it in this blog, a private blog, or something entirely unlike a blog? I don’t know quite yet. It is easy to forget at first (before anyone discovers your blog) that information in blogs is generally available to the public. That is not really suitable for some types of journals. I guess my answer would be easier if I was sure about what type of journal I want to keep.

Why air this pointless monologue on the front page? Because, what little I am sure of in my blogging intentions, this fits. It is what I am thinking and I have no reason to keep it private, even if my public here can be counted on my thumbs – and even if my public were to grow in the future.

Categories
life

The Power of Direction

I have often floundered in my life when I did not feel that I had a direction in my mind for where I was heading with my current situation. I found myself in one of those doldrums last year – in about March.

I was in the middle of a very difficult second semester of my masters program and I was feeling very separated from my department and fellow students as a result of living over 100 miles from campus. I began to look forward to where I was headed and I realized that I was unsure. I wanted to get a PhD, but I did not know where and I was not even fully committed to that course of action. I had considered the programs at Brigham Young University and Utah State University, but I was leaning towards the program at the University of Georgia.

I made the question a matter of prayer and late in the month of March while I was deep in contemplation I felt the impression that I should have a look at the University of Missouri. I had applied and been accepted there among the many universities that I had considered for my Masters degree, but had never thought of it after I had chosen to do my Masters degree at Utah State University. I got very excited once I began looking at their program because many of the faculty were working in areas that I was interested in and they accepted new PhD students in the Winter semester which would allow me to continue directly after finishing my Masters degree in December.

From the time I decided to aim for the University of Missouri I did better in my classes and was more focused on my program and my long-term goals. I got in contact with faculty at MU and I knew what I needed in the way of grades etc. for applying to their program. I had deadlines to meet and all my uncertainty was gone. I guess I live for the future.