Goals. Strategies. Task Lists.
There is something about a full calendar that brings me peace.
When dreams turn into goals, I find my sweet spot. A vision is cast, and I get to work. A thousand moving pieces do not scare me. There’s always a plan big enough to catch them all. The further in life I get, the bigger the plans get. I have a relatively good idea what I’ll be doing in each week of the next six months.
Goals. Tasks. Plans. A future.
“The Soul needs a future,” I read. “Of course it does!” I say to myself. “That’s why planning is so important. It takes away the anxiety of the unknown and replaces it with concrete steps!”
Right?
No, Tony. Not right.
“What happened to Hope?” he says to me through my computer screen. “It’s on Thursday, between 1:30-2:00pm.” That’s why I do all of this, I explain. I hope for a better future, and so I work hard toward it. I’ll make that future, through these goals and tasks.
That’s why I plan, so that hope can be made tangible. But maybe hope never wanted me to make it anything…
The Soul needs a future. The Soul needs hope.
“What happened to Hope?” I thought it was there. I thought I had held onto it. But maybe I didn’t. I think I traded it for a nice plan.
Hope and Planning both talk about the future, but in different ways, from different starting points. Where am I starting from? Where do I stand? Is this a future projected from the place of the present? I don’t think we need any more of that in the world. I don’t think we need more people pressing their view of “should” and “could” on me or others. Another set of plans, another agenda.
Planning and Hope are surely different, for they have two very different starting places for understanding the future. Planning takes its ground in the present, looks out, and projects a future from where it stands. But Hope, she does something different. She is inaugural, calling out from another place. She is the future reaching out toward me, the footprints of a future self asking me to leave where I am, for there is something much better coming, if I’m ready for it.
The Soul needs a future, but the future cannot be self-substantiated. If it is born from pure power of will, is it not always just the present? Is it not based on and confirmed by that which already was there?
If there is good greater than what we know now, then there must be hope that we can join it. There must be an actual way to move forward. And if this future is not made from my own efforts, then that means I’m not alone in this. Hope requires help. Hope is help.
Do you need some help? It’s here.
But maybe it needs a bit more room than a half hour on Thursday.
Still Wandering,
Tony