This morning was one of those were time just seemed to stand still. Having the time constantly in front of you subtley lurking in the bottom right hand corner of your screen only serves to heighten the fixation about time.And time doesn't just stop at minutes and hours but broadens into days, weeks, months...
We're almost halfway through 2009. 4 months ago I turned 27. In 8 months time I'll be 28.
I think we sometimes do put a bit too much emphasis on time and age and create deadlines for ourselves that aren't based on anything substantial. We must have a career by a certain age, we must get married, have kids, own property, and the list goes on as we raise the bar with our expectations and sometimes let ourselves down (needlessly) because we didn't manage to achieve our own unsubstantiated goal.
Don't get me wrong, I think having goals and trying to attain your dreams is a good thing. However I believe that goals need to be flexible because life is unpredictable and there are no guarantees.
My goals in life are quite standard and not very precise. I like being surprised with what life has to offer.
I agree that one needs to be flexible when setting goals since, as you said, life is unpredictable and there are no guarantees! The worrying thing is that in many cultures, there seem to be a number of unwritten rules pushing people to achieve various goals by the time one is X years old. Taking the US culture as an example, the obsession with losing one's virginity by the time one hits the 20th birthday (at best) puts a great deal of pressure on those people who are, say, in their mid-20s and are still virgins.
ReplyDeleteThe same discourse could also be applied to various careers; there still seems to be the idea that if one did not start working in certain areas from a very early age, it would be almost impossible to embark on such careers at a later stage in life (medicine, to mention one example).
I have frequently wished that human beings were immortal (in one dimension or another!) so that whatever is not achieved during the few years that one spends on this planet could be achieved at a later point in time... :)