Is No Wind Favorable?


What do you want? Seriously. Life is finite. You have no idea how much time remains. But you know there are coming limits and a definitive end. What is important to you and where do you want to go with this thing?

This is a fundamental question regarding the value that you place upon your own time, your own joy, your own wellbeing. In effect, your life itself. Whether you bother to take in those sunrises and sunsets, they occur. Time marches. Consider for a moment… Do you have written goals? Do you have a plan to better yourself? Do your daily ACTIONS align with what you SAY is important to you? What would an outsider, observing your daily existence, think is most important to you? You ok with that?

If you have no clear plan for your life, you really can’t complain. People stumble through life all the time. Just look around. That is an option. But not a path to happiness. That is, rather, a path to the unnecessary (harsher side of me might say “silly”) discontent that arises from relinquishing the one superpower that you have… the power to DECIDE. Dramatic? Sure. But it is the one thing of value that you truly possess. You choose to have a family or not. You choose how much you value that family and those friends. You choose your career, your hobbies, your educational pursuits. You choose to spend or save the money you earn (and may choose to spend money you haven’t yet earned). You choose where your precious time goes, whether you want to acknowledge that truth or not. You choose your faith (free will in the Christian lexicon) even (and none is a specific decision).

What holds us back? Fear, of course. Fear of… what? Getting it wrong. Coming up short. Looking silly. Right… because looking silly would be much worse than not bothering at all and then having to reconcile with ourselves when it’s all over. But, of course, we don’t usually look at it that way. We look at things in the most immediate terms so that we don’t have to ask ourselves what we are afraid of. So that we don’t have to make tough trade-offs. You still ok with that? If not, start today. If so, read somebody else’s work.

To simplify even further, we can call on Seneca. The Roman statesmen, playwright, and Stoic philosopher reminds us: “If a man knows not to which port he sails, no wind is favorable”.

To which port are you sailing?

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