I don't think there are many people who could say that they always do what they want. Life as we know it involves adjustments and compromises. One of our most important skills we must learn is to cooperate with others. This makes it possible for us to have enough time and energy to do all of the things we must do each day.
After working to earn a living, all of us want to have some time left to do some of the things we personally want to do as well. Most of us know this as 'free time'. We need to have or find enough time so that we can feel we can do what we must, as well as, what we want.
Since most of us like to have friends and families in our lives, we need to find a way to cooperate with others and schedule time for our relationships to develop and be maintained. Making some plans to meet and having enough time to spend with those we care about, makes for a good time and good relationships.
Some people I know are always racing around. Whether I think about their lives 10 years ago or last week, I notice that they fill their lives with activity. Some of them appear to have hardly a moment free. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing.
People with a high level of energy are able to do many things in a given amount of time. They also may require a degree of activity greater than others to feel stimulated and satisfied. When this is a choice, I admire them; when it is frenetic disorganization, it is sad that no one in their lives gets to spend enough time with them to mean much.
The other alternative at the extreme is the person so laid back and aimless that whole weeks go by without much being accomplished. There is a danger that these people will find that as the Pink Floyd song says, 'no one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun' and 'then one day you'll find, ten years have gone behind you'.
Sometimes, this life ends in despair or even worse, in tragedy, when they realize many years have passed with their hopes and dreams unfulfilled. They might also find themselves alone, because other people have moved on and left them behind.
Neither of the two extremes frantic/frenetic or laid back/comatose are likely to be successful.
Personal fulfilment and satisfaction come, I think, from achieving your personal goals. You can't achieve your goals and fulfil your dreams without defining them, or if you only have a vague idea of what they are. It is only after you decide to take an objective look at yourself that you stop running your life on autopilot.
The best way for each of us to get the things we need done each day, and also to free up enough time to fulfil some of our personal wants, is to think about what will make us happiest and head in that direction.
Once we have some idea of who we are and what we really want, we can decide which things we have been doing which eat up our time and waste our energy. Some of these we could probably eliminate immediately. Others we might combine together and by using our time more efficiently, multitask and combine a number of activities by doing a series of them in one trip.
Both knowing what we want, we have more of a chance to get it. Be wasting less time running in circles we can take steps toward doing something we always wanted to do.
Soon it will be easy to see that by making our dreams a reality, we are not letting anybody down. In fact, by picking ourselves up, we are bringing more, not less, to our day and, that of everyone around us.
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