Where am I trying to get to?
The World Cup might have brought a frenzy of goals (at times), but in the World generally a goal frenzy seems to be going on all the time.
Where am I trying to get to? A better question: do I need to ask myself that at all?
I understand why I do – I am trying to bring about some certainty and rational explanation to please myself strategically and intellectually. A strategy and a good rationalisation can be very reassuring.
But trying to get somewhere suggests that where I am is not good enough, and improvement is required. This sounds very worthy, but it is also relentless and very anxious. The attitude of trying to get somewhere never ends, and just tends to pick up workaholism, exhaustion, alcohol and expensive holidays along the way.
What happens in the absence of trying to create certainty by getting somewhere? The answer in my economic, moralistic, compulsive conditioning is: I become a lazy bastard. Not getting somewhere is inherently passive, and we need to be pro-active, is the message I hear broadcast in many convincing ways.
However, living in this supposedly shameful absence of goals, I have found that not to be true; the opposite in fact. Another tasty paradox for me to feast on.
When I am not creating certainty, I am inviting mystery… and that’s when the real action kicks in. Instead of things happening by me, they seem to happen through me; it still feels strange to describe it that way. 
I guess I mean that I end up doing things I never could have predicted, in ways I never would have considered I could. With much less alcohol and holidays involved.
That’s one of the differences that seems to come from choosing free will over iron will.
Ideas – the good ones – only seem to materialise when I’m staring out of the window, unthinkingly. Possibilities I could never imagine only present themselves when I stop striving to imagine them. Aaah… how delicious.
But sometimes things that seem like a paradox are not really a paradox at all, they are just the unfamiliar truth peeking out from behind the convincing illusion.
A very obvious clue that I missed for so long: my dreams only happen when I have relinquished control to sleep. Without permitting a meaningful release, I live in a dreamless, imprisoned state, trying hopelessly to get somewhere else. Completely unnecessarily.
I shall definitely keep trying to stop trying. Oh, hang on…
