Perhaps you're living a life where happiness, fulfilment or meaning is dependent upon reaching some future goal:
You'll happy when you retireYou'll rest only when you've made (you choose how much) moneyYou'll be fulfilled when people at last recognise and appreciate you
Meanwhile, you'll put up with living a life at odds with yourself, or a life in which you don't take care of what's right here - your body, your loved ones, your talents, your capacity to contribute, and all the people who can support you.What will your life be, do you think, if you never get to your dreamed-of destination? If the goal is never fulfilled in the way you’re imagining it? If you're thwarted in your intentions by breakdowns and failure along the way? If illness, or death, intervenes? Or if you get there and find out it wasn’t, at all, how you imagined it to be?Have lofty, ambitious goals, yes. Set out for something, yes. Bring energy, commitment, hope and optimism to it, yes. Make a contribution. Make a splash.But please don’t do it for the far-off result alone, or have your life rely on things turning out in order for you to be fully in it.Too many people have constructed their lives this way and found out, too late, that their deferring life in favour of an unknown future turned them away from the deeper rewards - and bigger contribution - made possible through actually living.
Maybe your thoughts turn quickly to standards, checking always if you are good enough, and if you're right.Or maybe your thoughts turn to how you can help, and how you're probably letting people down already.Maybe your thoughts turn to what's been achieved, discounting anything that's not doing or producing.Or maybe they turn towards the particular sadness you're feeling.Maybe your thoughts go on and on, ever deeper into the intricacies of whatever your attention has settled upon.Or maybe you're scanning the situation for all that is dangerous and a cause for fear.Maybe your thoughts leap ahead into the future, away from now, and into the many possibilities you can see. Maybe they're looking for all the ways you can be in control of things once again.Or maybe they're discounting all that is troublesome and difficult, reassuring you and soothing you with stories about what is good and hopeful.Whichever of these is most familiar to you, maybe it's just a habit of thinking that's become invisible because of its familiarity.And maybe you've taken your own familiar thoughts, which are only one way of understanding your life, to be the one and only the truth.
One of the first of 
From the moment we arrive in the world, we have to learn to fit in with the family and social situation into which we were born.Learning how to behave, and how not to behave, who to be and who not to be, is a necessary and inescapable part of our early development. But it also has an enormous cost - our separation from our own instincts. In all our fitting in with what others require of us we lose touch with our capacity to trust ourselves and to know what is genuinely good for us. And we lose touch with that which is essentially, uniquely ours to bring, that which will bring us most vibrantly to life, and perhaps make a contribution to everyone around us.And so if learning to fit in - becoming socialised into our family and culture - is a necessary part of our early development, finding ourselves and taking up our place in the world is a necessary part of our adult development. And this involves finding out all the ways we've become alienated from ourselves, from our basic goodness, and from our deep capacity to distinguish what is called for in, and from, our lives.It probably takes waking up to the basic facts of our lives to begin to take this as seriously as we need to - that life is very short, filled with uncertainty, and cannot be controlled. And that there's nobody to take responsibility for our brief stay here but ourselves.Perhaps once we begin to get a feel of all of this, we can begin the urgent work of seeing through the layers of expectation and conformity which we took on in order to navigate our early years and, gradually, uncover our essential selves once again.
A hospital emergency department demands that doctors deal with 95% percent of patients within four hours. And then finds that the number of people admitted unnecessarily to hospital beds has massively increased.A retail bank calls in to its branch managers three times a day to find out if they've hit their target for selling loans. And then finds out they've loaned to large numbers of people who could never afford to pay.A technology help-desk demands that all queries are dealt with in under five minutes, meaning more customers are helped. And complaints go up because problems are not being solved completely.Has it struck you that the more you try to manage us by giving us rules to follow (and this includes holding us to narrow measures that distract us from the wholeness or ultimate purpose of our work), the more you train us to be skilful rule-followers rather than people who can exercise judgement, discretion and wisdom?What else, really, did you expect?
As well as living your life, you're always in the midst of a story about it all, though perhaps it doesn't often seem this way.Our stories quickly become transparent, invisible, in the living of them.But one evening, reading a book or watching a film, you find yourself deeply touched by the situation of one of the characters. Maybe it's the one nobody understands, the one with hidden gifts they can't seem to bring to the world, the one who seems doomed to hurt others, the one who has been carrying a heavy burden that nobody will take away, or the one who longs for some kind of resolution. You're moved. You feel seen. And you have an insight, for a moment, into the way you're constructing the story of your own life.New possibilities open when we find stories that reflect our own experience in this way. It's what the great fairy tales and myths can do. And it's how the films and books that touch us reach behind the surface of things and show us our lives.Most of us can also do with finding people who can do this for us. People who appreciate and show us, compassionately, the stories we're living. People who see the hurt and the suffering, the longing and the hope, the wishes unfulfilled, and what we've been working so hard to bring about. And people who bring what's become invisible to us back to our attention, so that we can find ourselves again.Even more importantly, we need people around us who can see beyond all the stories. Those who show us who we are that's outside all the narratives - of success and failure, joy and hurt, achievement and disappointment - with which we identify ourselves.And we need those who can bring us new stories with which to interpret our lives. Stories with more space in them, bigger possibilities, and more life-giving ways of understanding ourselves. Stories that reconnect us with the sources of dignity, courage and strength that can sustain us as we do what only we can do.It's quite a gift to come across people who can do this for us.And isn't it, in the end, what skilful friendship, teaching, and leadership are all about?
It's true - there isn't enough time to do everything on your list.And there is no final state of 'everything done' that you can reach, no matter how fast you're going.There's probably not even enough time to do everything you think is important.Would coming to terms with the messiness and ever-incompleteness of life allow you out of your cycle of rushing and give you a chance to live? And might that in turn be the opportunity, at last, to do something that really matters, because you're no longer chasing everything else?
What might often be quite hard to see is that your understanding of the world is much more expressed in your practices - what you're doing again and again - than in what you say about yourself.You could look into this topic by studying your relationships with others. What is it that you take to be true about you and other people in relationship? And what understanding is embodied by what you actually do?Often, in my work in organisations, I come across leaders who sincerely wish to treat those around them as capable, responsible adults but who consistently embody in their practice an orientation of '
At some point in your life you're going to need to include a practice of regular quiet time: time by yourself, letting your life sink in, being still, allowing yourself at last to feel it all.Does it occur to you that without this, you run the risk of living a full-tilt life that you never, quite, manage to touch?And a life that is never, quite, allowed to touch you in return?
Self-care: