Sentinals in the Night

The freeway was mostly empty of cars last night as I drove home from work. By midnight, most people have enough sense to be off the roads and at home in bed. As I proceeded home, I had driven past that stretch of the parkway with a lot of businesses on either side of the road and the only illumination came from my headlights and from the freeway lighting mounted on the towering poles in the center of the road. The lights were mounted in pairs, each light facing out toward either side of the road. The pairs of lights stood like sentinels, one pair after another stretching out ahead of me. The yellowish points of light snaked out into the night, sometimes rising, sometimes falling. These sentinels lit my way ahead, undulating to the left and right and then straightening out for a stretch of road. The road would dogleg to the left again or to the right perhaps. I had a sure sense of where the road would go just ahead and I could mentally note that I would need to turn just a bit to the left or right in about a minute. These sentinels were my unwavering guides to what lay just ahead and they marked the way home through the darkness that covered the land on either side of the road.

Sometimes I try to look into the future to glean some sense of where I am headed and what life has in store for me. There are no such sentinels lighting the road ahead in this case… only unbroken darkness which stretches infinitely on into the mists of time. As I move forward, one minute at time, I am able to see where I am today, at this moment. However, even the minute just ahead is just as much an unknown quantity as the minute a week or a year into the future. I am forced to simply use my accumulated knowledge and wisdom, my instincts and my intuition as I move forward in my life. The future remains a constant, unfathomable unknown.

There have certainly been moments in my life when I would have truly welcomed the procession of solemn pairs of sentinels lighting the way ahead as I was moving from one moment to the next. Had they been there to mark the path ahead, I might not have made so many wrong turns along the way. Perhaps my journey might have taken me in a very different direction. In truth, my life has not turned out badly for me. But it is only human to look back and feel some regret at having wasted as much precious time allotted to me as I did.

Question of the Day - August 31, 2006

If you were going to be remembered by the world for having accomplished only one specific thing, what accomplishment would you want that to be? Why?

Question of the Day - August 30, 2006

If your life is really off-course and you are headed in what is clearly the wrong direction, how do you go about turning your life around? What do you do to get back on track?

The Challenge: To Sustain the Forward Momentum and To Keep Moving On

I just spent the last two days sorting out the very jumbled contents of three boxes of miscellaneous tools, whatsits, nails and assorted screws. I was trying to organize what I had and trying to make them fit into three tool boxes. Until two days ago, I would studiously avoid even looking at the three boxes, because I knew that once I did, I would feel guilty. This chore had at the top of my pain-in-the-rear “to do” list for quite awhile and I was avoiding doing it for as long as I could.

However, two days ago I bit the bullet and just dived in. Once I got started sorting through the stuff, I found it wasn’t all that bad. Just one of those things you have to start doing. Once you have, it is no big deal to just work through the job until you are done. When I had completed the sort and organized the tool boxes, I think I even felt a sense of real accomplishment. More than that, I really felt like a hundred pound weight had been lifted from off of my shoulders.

There were other things which I also needed to take care of. Just finishing one thing on my list gave me a bit of momentum to move on to the next item.

Life is often like that. Sometimes we have these periods when we get absolutely nothing done. The longer we are in that state, less and less gets done and we begin to feel a bit anxious. Life is all about continually taking stock of our situation, making decisions and doing something about those decisions. And when we do act on our decisions, we start to feel good about ourselves again. We begin to feel more alive… happier with ourselves.

Other things have been going on in my life. I have had some rather weighty matters on my mind, of late. And there have been too many days when I was entirely too distracted to take care of the things I needed to do “today.”

Here’s the thing. If we do not take care of the things we need to do today, we cannot move on with our lives. We get stuck in place and time. We can become a little lost in our own lives and it can become a real struggle to get moving again. Life is just too short to squander even a moment of our lives, especially through procrastination or indecision.

We are all faced with this challenge, each and every day. We always have to remember that we are only as good as we are today. Also, we have to remember that the only things that we absolutely have to take care of are the things that need to be done today. It never ends until the day we die.

I have come to believe that in the game of life, this is pretty much what it comes down to. Not rocket science, by any means. But at least for me, this is the most straight-forward game plan I can see that works. And, you know, at the end of the day, if you have taken care of the most important items on your “to do” list, as well as you can, you feel pretty damn good.

It is late. The toolboxes are organized and stowed away now. That may not seem like much of an accomplishment, to you. But knowing this makes me feel good. My life is the sum of all the small battles I will have to fight along the way. Today I just won one of those small battles.