Pointless

Goal is but a word, an idea first and foremost which, once employed, casts a net that ensnares, entwining us to an imagined point in the future, with a related delineation beginning here in the present, and tethering us to a particular path with many properties not necessarily to be enjoyed in themselves, but as means to an end. Why create such a netting for ourselves? If we are fishing for something in our lives, something we desperately believe is missing and needed, and if we are cognizant of the container we are fashioning for ourselves, sure, why not, cast a net! But if what we really want is freedom, and we are not too “caught up” already in a host of agendas, we might think twice about goal setting, and we might harbor a healthy skepticism toward those nudging us to plot points on the horizon of our future selves. A point-less life, by contrast—life, that is, with fewer points—frees us for the frivolity of being, for feeling more fully the joy and difficulty of becoming, and for cherishing, indeed savoring, the spectrum of what already is.

Development is not linear. Nor does it require a point. If we are interested in cultivating a growth mindset, or concerned with matters of maturation and human development, it is crucial to keep in mind the generative messiness at the heart of our humanity. Growth happens, quite apart from any agenda, and, when we grow, there is almost always a series of regular regressions that inhere, not contrary to but as constitutive of growth. There is often as much devolution as evolution, as much confusion as clarity about the process at hand, and with a thoroughgoing disorientation, as a vital point of orientation, a healthy and humbling point of reference reminding us of the dazzling, puzzling, often circular, and open-ended nature to human nature and all our human strivings, including and especially our striving after striving itself, our ubiquitous obsession with education, progress, and the endless acquisition of information, all too often at the expense of the exquisiteness of being, and, when needed, unlearning, letting go of anesthetizing beliefs and attitudes, and antiquated narratives we have told ourselves for too long, insisting these narratives are us when, in fact, they are only containers meant to hold us for a time, until a new form of flourishing becomes us.

There is no denying it: we are hopelessly, helplessly subjective, and we live the subjective intuitions of our inheritance, handed down to us from our mothers, fathers, and countless ancestors mostly unbeknownst to us. This inheritance includes but is not limited to bits and pieces of our character, the goals we think we set for ourselves, dreams and ambitions, but also illusions we chase, and deceptions forming the fabric of self-imposed prisons entangling us within a web of objectives we believe we must be about, followed by using the present, as a tool, for our focus on the future and the realization of these objectives. Another way to be, however, is not to aim too often for any mark, but to be a little more purposeless, and a lot more playful, as a posture, to experiment, like a young child, toying and tinkering with things, without too much certainty about outcomes, and with a radical, unreflective rootedness in the messy, organic nature of one’s unique unfolding, less like a line of undaunted progress, and more a swirling, spiraling process, one where we find ourselves circling back, perhaps many times over, to some of the same ideas, habits, and modes of being we might have thought we left behind once and for all, only to rediscover some of these modes in ever new tones and shades, again and again and again. This reincarnation and rediscovery of the past in the present and its anticipation in the future need not be cause for any concern but rather celebration, for with each reemergence there is fresh opportunity for play, for creative engagement with what once gave us trouble or held us captive, with that which tempted or taunted or triggered us in some way displeasing to our sensibilities, now, an occasion for curiosity and the imagination, for befriending the process of becoming itself, for introspection and novel experimentation, not necessarily with the aim of any advancement, but purely for the pleasure of being.