When The Best Goal Is No Goal

It’s when you get the chance to surprise yourself.

One New Year I found myself crawling through the first 10 days, feeling out of place, feeling jaded, feeling jagged, feeling bone weary, and about 100 years old. And then I found the most liberating thing.

Here’s how it started …

I used to be mad about New Year. I used to love the rituals, the parties, the excitement, the magic sizzling in the air. The way everything sparkled with new promise. The way I could leave everything behind and start again. New life. New goals. But lately, I couldn’t force myself into even the smallest of goals, and it was freaking me out a little because I was always just so damn good at being New-Year-ish.

So I started a search …

And I found myself drawn to a new idea. It was Leo Babauta’s The Best Goal Is No Goal and I loved how he spoke about how liberating it can be to live without goals, about how goals can actually be intensely limiting, and how it doesn’t actually mean that you stop achieving things. You just get a chance to surprise yourself.

Because you might end up in surprising places …

Leo writes, “Consider this common belief: ‘You’ll never get anywhere unless you know where you’re going.’ This seems so common sensical, and yet it’s obviously not true if you stop to think about it. Conduct a simple experiment: go outside and walk in a random direction, and feel free to change directions randomly. After 20 minutes, an hour … you’ll be somewhere! It’s just that you didn’t know you were going to end up there.”

If you live without goals, he says, you’ll end up in surprising places. My heart fluttered at the thought. There was that feeling I had been searching for. That twinkling promise of something new. That delight at something rare and unexpected. That magic sizzle in the air.

The call of the moment …

Because really, when you’re living without goals, it means you get to stop forcing yourself into doing something that you might not honestly feel like doing at all, it means you can give yourself the freedom to explore entirely unimagined things … it means you follow the call of that exact moment, follow your feet, your heart, your passion.

“In the end,” he says, “I usually end up achieving more than if I had goals, because I’m always doing something I’m excited about. But whether I achieve or not isn’t the point at all: all that matters is that I’m doing what I love, always.”

“I end up in places that are wonderful, surprising, great. I just didn’t know I would get there when I started.”

And so I let go …

And even though personal freedom is something I have fought for so incredibly fiercely ever since I was a little girl, I realised that in fighting for my space I had somehow become the most tiring taskmaster to myself. My own goals, ambitions, and expectations had, over the years, become increasingly demanding and restrictive. A burden rather than a delight.

And so I let go. I let go of my goals. And I started to live.

And in that, I found a whole new freedom.