What do we really want?
My friend Dave Stuart Jr. recently wrote that part of an educator's role is to clear away the clouds that hide the mountaintop from their students.
His reason: many students feel school is just a set of hoops to jump through, a trial to endure, or, simply put, pointless.
Reading his brief but poignant post, it occurred to me that the way we train the youngest among us may have shaped our entire culture.
And not in a good way.
Just as we spent our first two decades jumping through hoops, we tend to treat the rest of life as a series of stages to get through.
The result is that we've lost sight of anything resembling a vision for our lives. In our minds, we're simply doing the best we can. For the most part, we do what's required to get by.
I get it. Life can be really hard, and right now survival may be your top priority.
But how many of us will admit we've adopted that same mentality toward everything? Our job, a bad relationship, our marriage. Same approach.
Do the best we can and get by.
I believe there's a much better way to live.
Can you imagine your best life ten years from now? Your job progressing to where it could be, your relationship clicking, your bank account looking good? And there's so much more that can go well.
It feels good to think about those things. It's good to imagine how to get there, and better still to plan how to get there.
Yet so much of our thinking centers on what's required: what to avoid, what to stop, what not to do.
Nowhere is this truer than with addiction. Most of us approach freedom as a list of don’ts. Don't drink, don't use, don't go there. But "not doing" is a hard thing to build a life on. Freedom tends to stick when there's something on the other side we actually want.
The kind of change that transforms a life, and ripples out to a family, a community, or an organization, begins with a better vision for the future.
It doesn't start with behavior change like, do this, don't do that. It starts with desire for something better. It's about who and what we can and will be.
That changes our approach. Suddenly we're on a mission. We have more than goals; we have vision. It's no longer about surviving this season of life or making it easier to get through. It's about moving toward something worth having, and letting go of whatever doesn't help us get there.
Vision is the mountaintop. When the clouds clear, the climb finally starts to makes sense.
This is where helping each other takes on new meaning. We both want something better, and we're both trying to get there. Giving help and getting it are crucial parts of the equation for all of us.
We don't have to wait until the pain of not changing drives us toward it. We can want something better right now, and go after it.
Here's to doing that together.
