weekend map-making

Last Friday I shared a realization with my sister about passion, purpose and recognition. It agitated her enough to ask if there was a way I could help her cut a swath through the confusion of where she is right now and what she is doing. I said I also needed the same path-finding so we decided to take ourselves through a weekend workshop of sorts. I designed it and we both participated. We spent most of Saturday and good chunk of Sunday mapping out our lives.

We were not totally lost, but mostly we were distracted. Our daily life has been fairly comfortable but we lacked a sense of urgency and we somehow often found ourselves wondering where the time went. We had goals but the progress we see every day is unremarkable when we knew that it is possible to make things happen in significant leaps. Did we lack motivation? Not really.  But we found that we focused on the wrong things and we needed to fix our priorities. At its worst, we lingered too long in phases that would have been beneficial in the short run but detrimental in the long run. Like boats that have gone bone dry from being beached too long.

So we labored through a lot of questions and admitted a lot of shortcomings. We identified solutions and gave ourselves better-defined goals. We cut through much of the fluff and recognized the core of our passions. We saw that through the years these passions have become encrusted with compromises and misdirection, as well as weighed down with almost all the permutations of procrastination.

We caught the bad habits and exposed them for what they were. We dug for the good stuff in our hearts and brought it forward and gave it the command to take us through the journeys we have postponed for too long. The ship will finally sail with well drawn maps and a properly working compass. Anchors aweigh!