Late one Friday night, I was hanging out on my couch when I decided to become deeply concerned about the fact that I don’t have any goals. Despite being surrounded by inspiration from the well-worn posters of my independent school district, I’ve never been able to comprehend what it means to “Shoot for the moon and if you miss you will still be among the stars.” Nor was I able to understand why, “If you aim at nothing you’re sure to hit it.” I was also crushed on many occasions when my Scholastic book order would come in and my free poster was of two brown horses or a dumb kitten clutching a tree branch with the words “Hang in there!” spelled out in Cooper Black. But that’s another story for another time..

Lack of goals, in my case, isn’t to be confused with lack of ambition. Concrete goals feel constrictive and a little bit pointless to me. It’s as if I was trying to build a fence in space. Everything is wide open and our time on Earth is a blip on the screen. Knowing that has kept me off the trail since I was a kid. There are things I’ve done, places I’ve worked, and countries I’ve travelled that I thought would have been the ultimate dream. The reality was often far different. Conversely, the same has been true. I’m willing to try almost anything once and I want to try it all. So it becomes endless, these things that I think up. For example, here are some things I’d like to do:

* Write a book

* Have a show

* Buy a house somewhere

* Kiss my student loans goodbye

* Travel to Africa and Antarctica and Russia and Spain and Turkey and Iraq and the Yucatan

* Successfully organize and launch something that matters

* Meet Dolly Parton

* Speak in public

* Be in a position where i don’t need to concern myself with money or insurance or commitments

* Drive all over the United States, taking back roads through towns that haven’t been touristed

* Sit on top of an elephant

* Own an old post office jeep

I’ve been slow to realize that these things I think up do count as goals. It’s just that “goals” is a little too Powerpoint pie chart for me. I love questions without answers and talks that aren’t small. Beginnings and experiments and discarding “how-to.” And strategy being the sounds others don’t make. At the end of every day, I am confident that I know absolutely nothing at all and that most things really don’t matter.