Day 69 of this journey and I feel like my productivity has increased dramatically. I am gaining focus and clarity. Time to re-evaluate and re-establish some personal goals. It seems that life has become quite comfortable for Kathy and I. It is during these periods that goals sometimes take a back seat and lose their inertia. Life is pretty good, no real complaints to speak of, why set goals? The goals I am speaking of are longer term. Where will we live in 5 years? What will our careers look like? What will our financial needs be? Do we want to make any significant change to our lifestyle? What living arrangements would we like to have?

This comfortable state of lateral drift has been fine for the last couple of years, but we should really sit down and look at a longer term road map and start charting our course. I want to make sure we do things today that empower our decisions tomorrow. We live a fairly simple and sustainable lifestyle today and I only seeing that getting leaner in the years ahead.

This will be a bit of a challenge as Kathy & I have two very different modes of operating. It will be fun to come together to establish the goals and put a disciplined plan in place to achieve them. I look forward to the process and I really look forward to refining our thoughts and dreams into a distilled plan. It has been a long time since we have had a solid joint plan in place. Who knows what adventures may be borne out of this effort?

When I was a Boy Scout, we played a game when new Scouts joined the troop.  We lined up chairs in a pattern, creating an obstacle course through which the new Scouts, blindfolded, were supposed to maneuver.  The Scoutmaster gave them a few moments to study the pattern before our adventure began.  But as soon as the victims were blindfolded, the rest of us quietly removed the chairs.  I think life is like this game.  Perhaps we spend our lives avoiding obstacles we have created for ourselves and in reality exist only in our minds.  We’re afraid to apply for that job, take violin lessons, learn a foreign language, call an old friend, write our Congressman – whatever it is that we would really like to do but don’t because of personal obstacles.  Don’t avoid any chairs until you run smack into one.  And if you do, at least you’ll have a place to sit down.  ~ Pierce Vincent Eckhart