The Path – Goals – Do you dream of paths diverging in a yellow wood? Checklists? Maps? Are you talking to yourself as you follow your routine? What IS your routine? How has your routine evolved? What efforts have you made to change it to newly perceived needs and discoveries? Or is your routine formed outside you, for the benefit of others?

If You Have No Goal, Any Path Will Take You There – But you won’t like where you end up. Besides, you DO have a goal, (at least one) especially since that last epiphany. Sometimes it’s something as simple as “stopping the pain” or “staying healthy.” As you become more adept at change, you realize dividing effort into “steps” to achieve a goal is critical. Take weight loss: the intimidating goal of losing 50 pounds. That won’t happen fast. Your conscious, subconscious, unconscious and collective unconscious (not to mention your pre-conscious!) are going to kick up a helluva fuss. YOU WILL CHANGE. That’s guaranteed. Studying the history of human weight loss attempts if you are not ready for the psychic pushback your body will actually double down and accelerate its weight gain. The same thing happens with alcoholism and drug addiction – trying to “control “ it often drives the supplicant deeper into their disease in a panicked reaction to the “loss” of supply.

Challenge – But you can be ready. This is nothing more than the sore-muscled athlete, Day 2, thinking, I CAN’T DO THIS. Guess what? EVERYBODY THINKS THAT! Expect it! You treat yourself with loving compassion and cold compresses, hot baths and massage. In other words, there is an established map, a way to GETH THROUGH THIS. The challenge is to apply such a map to yourself, and then TAILOR and CUSTOMIZE it to your goals.

Danger – Don’t go it alone. A side effect of “lessening supply” is “crazy thinking.” You will hear yourself say things like, “Nobody cares about me so I’ll just drink myself to death” Or “I WANT TO DISAPPEAR INTO THIS VAT OF ICE CREAM.” We all need somebody to talk us off the ledge, somebody who is familiar with not just our goals but what we are going through. Your id is holding the rest of you hostage, and you need an experienced hostage negotiator. So, don’t try making it through this crisis without a buddy AND a coach. AA has an acronym – HALT representing:
Hungry
Angry
Lonely
Tired
These are the emotion states in which you make Bad Decisions. So when you see this condition developing – Halt. Call your hostage negotiator immediately.

Opportunity – You will change. That’s the guarantee! You can’t go back to your old self. We can’t dip our fingers in the same river twice, and it turns out all addictions are an attempt to honor a past golden moment that can never, by definition, return. But you know what’s more interesting? Figuring out what that golden moment was, how it was caused, what it represents, and where the emotion you treasured is in your present life. And if it’ not there, how to get it. Trust me, there’s a world of love out there. If in doubt, see the movie UP. Now watch it again.

Meditation –

#Haiku: Goals

Courage is
Constant map redesign:
Looking backward
Planning forward