Tying Happiness to Having a Goal.
Intentions don’t become real without action.
I function best when I have a project. I’m good at completing tasks if I intend to take them on. No matter how complex or tedious the project, it gets done once I set my mind. In addition to having lofty intentions like being good, kind, sensitive to other people’s needs, loyal, and honest, I have missions to complete.
As a ten-year-old, I loved to clean up dirty things in my family’s apartment, like kitchen cabinet doors. Completing these self-assigned tasks made me feel I had accomplished something. I loved the feeling of completion and still do.
For example, my brother’s move to a nursing home created multiple projects that needed doing. I’m still working on some of them. He had an automobile accident ( body damage only)leading up to his transition from health to fatal illness. He had the car towed to a place that did nothing with it for three weeks—my concern over his lack of intention to fix this worsened daily. Finally, I spoke with his insurance company, and they towed the car to a repair shop forty miles from his home.
It was not a great solution, but it was a solution.
He was in the hospital, and the accident had lost its place in his brain. He had a rental car, barely used, at his home, which needed to be returned. And his repaired car required a drive back to his house. I had no intention of doing this, but I had no choice; no one else could handle this matter. After weeks of all-night worrying about it, I took it on as my assignment. My willing daughter and I got his car and returned the rental one.
With the terrific assistance of my daughter and son-in-law, I went through all his papers. It was a tedious job but needed doing. One must submit massive amounts of paperwork to Medicaid to obtain long-term government assistance, including five years of bank statements, 60 of them. Can you believe the nursing home informed me that three from 2017 were missing?
I intended to send the nursing home every month’s bank statement, but I couldn’t send what I couldn’t find. Intentions are unobtainable sometimes, but sometimes they get done. These were my current goals:
I intended to move twice in the last five years— and did that!
I intended to write a weekly blog — I’m now up to my eighty-third consecutive blog!
I intended to publish the first fifty blogs in a book — and did that, too!
I plan to keep in touch with my family and friends — and do that regularly!
Those are my recent actualized intentions. There were many others throughout my life.
But what now? Is everything else already over, or is it too late to do next?
There’s a chasm between what’s finished and what is still to accomplish. As Norman Lear said in today’s NYTimes, the words over and next are not given enough attention. The space between them describes his feelings of living “In the moment.”
My feelings about this space are not so benign. Living in the moment is like waiting for my next shoe to drop. Space is not my intention.
I’m drawing a blank about my next goal. It’s scary. I guess this is what retirement is all about. It’s too late for me to retire to a life of golf, tennis, or pickleball. Maybe I’ll switch to those lofty goals I mentioned earlier. However, they have always been there, underscoring other responsibilities, family ties, friendships, and activities. As someone who has reinvented herself multiple times without hesitation, my next intention is anxiety-ridden because it’s a blur.