“Man plans, and God laughs.” - old Yiddish adage
“People with goals generally burn the toast.” - yours truly
I have blindly stumbled, scorning myriad opportunities, throughout my life, leaving me stranded high and dry on a remote island separated by vast seas from my hopes and dreams. On paper I'm an utter failure in many respects. And yet this is how I toast my bagels:
One of my favorite postings, "Decision Factors", discusses the ultimate futility of planning and choosing:
Big-picture scenarios are like cartoons, and we don't live in cartoonish big-picture images, we live in trivial moments. This is not a movie. We're raindrops slowly working down windows, not heroic protagonists.So... "where do I see myself in five years?" Continuing with my earthworm emulation - i.e. ingesting soil all day while expelling slightly improved soil. It's only a downer if I dramatize it. Which I don't. And, oddly, with that one little flip, I appear, perversely and magically, to win. Slothy ambitionlessness somehow yields surprising results. Not that it's something I think about much. I've got bagels to butter.
Rich opportunity awaits at every juncture of every decision tree. Any choice, no matter how bright or disappointing, can yield a jackpot or a dud. In the end, it's not about the choice, it's the chooser. It's you, playing the cards you're dealt - both good hands and bad - with delight and exuberance. If you focus on the rich immediacy, rather than the cartoonish big picture...you literally can't go wrong.
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