Getting Out of the Fog

In my blog on entitled The Fog, I talked about how goals in my life had been very difficult to set as I didn't know where I was going and what I should be doing. I remember a sort of confusion that I had, existing every day. Life was pretty good, but there was nothing outstanding. And in fact, although parts of my life were very good, the whole life wasn't satisfying.

I think that to live a happy life, everything needs to be going well. Having financial wealth without friends, or being physically attractive and hating your job don't constitute a happy life. It's a given that we must work within a framework that we were born with. So I will never look like Brad Pitt and I will never run like Carl Lewis. But I could look make my body like Arnold Schwarzenegger's and I could become an astronaut or a doctor or a physicist or Prime Minister.

I accept that I will never run 100m in under ten seconds, and I accept that I don't look like Brad Pitt, but even if I could do that or did look like him, it wouldn't make me any happier than I am now.

Becoming someone else or having what someone else has will not make you any happier than you are now. Having what you want and being who you can be is what will make you happy.

When I was in my "fog" I knew that although nothing was badly wrong, I wasn't doing what I should be doing. My home life was good, in that I was happily married. Financially we were okay. I had a house, good equity positions in a couple of rental properties and money in the bank. Yet I knew that my life meant more than that. If I had suddenly earned a 50% pay increase at work, or been given my dream Porsche, or tickets for a six month trip around the world, that all would have been good, but it wouldn't have made my life happier for the long-term.

So in my fog I just plodded along day after day not knowing what I should do next. I have always been one to set goals and I must admit that for a couple of years I didn't set any, mostly because I didn't know what I should set.

As I look back on that today, I see how much the "fog" is lifting from my sights and I see a future beckoning.

In the past couple of weeks there have been a series of events that have changed my outlook and I see a way through to where I want to go. And although very little has changed, the fact that I can see a way forward that I'm happy with, makes me feel happier. I can see that I'm attracting some of the "good stuff" I've been looking for.

What's most interesting about these new opportunities, is that both of them were unexpected generous "gifts" from two different, totally unrelated people. When we look back at events in our life we can see that it takes unexpected situations to arise that change the course we're on.

I may look back on January 2007 as the turning point in my life. A month that will set up my future for the next thirty years. Even if it doesn't turn out to be the month, I know that at least it is the start of a major shift for me, which may take a year or so to develop, but somehow, I know it will happen.

An analogy I heard was that life is like driving at night. We can reach our destination a thousand kilometres away, even though we can only see the next hundred metres, because we only need to see the next hundred metres.

We should rest assured that our life's path is there for us to traverse, but we have to take each step, one at a time.