Stuck In The Spiral Of My Current Goals

But Are They The Goals That Are Getting Me Somewhere

Tabitha Low

Aug 17, 2022

white horse head in close up photography — Photo by Sayan Ghosh on Unsplash

So, as I was setting up this week’s to-do lists in my weekly planner, it struck me that, yes, these are decent enough goals, but where are they taking me?

Yes, I want a clean house. Yes, I want clean laundry that is folded and put away. Sure, a meal plan is a great thing to have and use. Yes, yes, writing every day, publishing five days a week, sure, sure.

What is the end goal here?

Where am I going?

Passion Planner has their mind-map in the front of their planners, but it only asks you to think of what you want. There are no tips or pointers for when you don’t have a clue.

What happens when you spend literally decades saying I wish I had a good husband, a nice house, kids, no white picket fence, but hey…and then…you have all that? Then you have to work through having the kids and homeschooling…then you have to work through the physical issues that your body develops…or at least this is my current path.

What happens when you step back and everything you thought you were creating in your life either isn’t there, isn’t as meaningful to you, or has been simply forgotten…because you got caught up in your kids, in your health, in whatever else?

Where do you begin? How do you go about things?

When I was a little kid my life goal was to become a cowboy veterinarian.

I won’t go into why I cannot stomach the thought of being a veterinarian now. It has to do with the ignorance of humans. I’ll leave it at that.

Cowboy? I never lived in an area where that could happen. However, I married a man who wears boots and there is nothing sexier than that to me. He’s afraid of horses, so that sort of nixes us riding together and everything. Not to mention, I haven’t been on a horse in thirty years or so.

However, I have always held on to this one tiny little niggle in the back of my brain and that husband is only now beginning to see and realize: a rescue ranch.

I think the original idea came to me when I was in middle school. I read a book called The Crumb by Jean Slaughter Doty.

Something about the main character taking care of the horse at the end of the book, but not being able to ride them. That is where the idea took seed.

Now, I have to move forward from knowing that 1 I do not want to live in this state any longer than I have to and 2 I want to create a safe place for animals to live when no one else wants them.

What can I do from where I am on a daily basis to achieve those goals? What do I need to know, need to learn, in order to make those goals happen and happen on a successful basis?

Is it enough for me, personally, to set these two things as a goal for, say, five years from now and to start creating plans to educate myself and build my world around these goals, at my age, without being certain of where we will end up as a family?

Will it be enough to work towards these goals, while working on my typical everyday goals? Will that move things forward? Will that move me forward?

I don’t have any more answers than I have written here.

At my age, I worry about pulling together any sort of large rescue place because what will happen to the animals if anything happens to me? See, there is another spot where things get tricky. It’s something I will have to research.

I think it is time for me to sit with my journal and write out every little thing that comes to mind about the goals of moving back home and about creating a rescue ranch.

Maybe a mind-map is what I need to work with and through at the moment, but not one that extolls me to dream of what I want in three to five years.

What about you? Where are you at with your dreams right now?

How do you move forward in times like this, when nothing seems to be going anywhere for you?