Perhaps you’re living a life where happiness, fulfilment or meaning is dependent upon reaching some future goal:

You’ll be happy when you retire
You’ll rest only when you’ve made (you choose how much) money
You’ll be fulfilled when people at last recognise and appreciate you

Meanwhile, you’ll put up with living a life at odds with yourself, or a life in which you don’t take care of what’s right here – your body, your loved ones, your talents, your capacity to contribute, and all the people who can support you.

What will your life be, do you think, if you never get to your dreamed-of destination? If the goal is never fulfilled in the way you’re imagining it? If you’re thwarted in your intentions by breakdowns and failure along the way? If illness, or death, intervenes? Or if you get there and find out it wasn’t, at all, how you imagined it to be?

Have lofty, ambitious goals, yes. Set out for something, yes. Bring energy, commitment, hope and optimism to it, yes. Make a contribution. Make a splash.

But please don’t do it for the far-off result alone, or have your life rely on things turning out in order for you to be fully in it.

Too many people have constructed their lives this way and found out, too late, that their deferring life in favour of an unknown future turned them away from the deeper rewards – and bigger contribution – made possible through actually living.

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