'The End'
I'm slowly reading through The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for about the seventh time, and as always, pretty much every day I'm reconvicted or learn something I didn't catch the last time. Well, yesterday I began reading about habit 2, 'Begin With the End in Mind'. I'm very familiar with the concept, Trooper and I even review our 'habits' regularly in school, but yesterday I was reminded to think on 'The End'. Usually I think about 'The End' on a small scale (the day, a project, a conversation, a school year), but Mr. Covey starts by inviting his readers to think of their whole lives in view of 'The End', and what we want that to look like. As I went through the mental exercise and thought about what I wanted out of my whole life, I came to a surprising conclusion. I've actually come to the conclusion before, so it shouldn't have been surprising at all, but for whatever reason I'd forgotten all about it.
Most of the things I want to have to show for my life are relational, being a solid parent/wife/friend/teacher etcetera, as I hope most of you would, but the surprising thing to me was that writing books was right up there on the list. When life gets busy or chaotic, writing is always the first thing to go. My brain tells me that everything else is more important, that I can live without it and people have plenty of other books to read, but my heart says otherwise. My heart says that somehow I have to make it fit because when my End comes, one of the many things I want to have people say about me is that they were touched by my words, that they saw life from a little bit different perspective because of me, and that reading my stories gave them both joy and conviction. I've no delusions of being the next Harriet Beecher Stowe or C.S. Lewis, mind you, but all the same I like to think my writing means something, and a little more than a good time.
So now comes the real problem, putting conviction into practice. How do I carve time for writing out of a full (and mostly important) day/week/month/year and not feel guilty for taking time away from something else? Or, failing that, how do I press on in spite of the guilt? How do I tell people, 'No,' because I'll be writing at that time? I sit here pinching my lips together as I try to figure it out. I could say I'll stop watching movies the few times I do during a week, but let's face it, usually by that time of night I'm not worth anything, anyway.
I have to come up with something.
Is there something you want to accomplish, something that, at your End, you want to be able to look back on and see in your life? Something that, as of now, you aren't making much progress in? If so, please share with me what you plan to do to make it happen. Maybe your plans will help me figure this out!
Best wishes to you as you work to figure out your End goals, and know that I'm down here working on mine, too.
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Most of the things I want to have to show for my life are relational, being a solid parent/wife/friend/teacher etcetera, as I hope most of you would, but the surprising thing to me was that writing books was right up there on the list. When life gets busy or chaotic, writing is always the first thing to go. My brain tells me that everything else is more important, that I can live without it and people have plenty of other books to read, but my heart says otherwise. My heart says that somehow I have to make it fit because when my End comes, one of the many things I want to have people say about me is that they were touched by my words, that they saw life from a little bit different perspective because of me, and that reading my stories gave them both joy and conviction. I've no delusions of being the next Harriet Beecher Stowe or C.S. Lewis, mind you, but all the same I like to think my writing means something, and a little more than a good time.
So now comes the real problem, putting conviction into practice. How do I carve time for writing out of a full (and mostly important) day/week/month/year and not feel guilty for taking time away from something else? Or, failing that, how do I press on in spite of the guilt? How do I tell people, 'No,' because I'll be writing at that time? I sit here pinching my lips together as I try to figure it out. I could say I'll stop watching movies the few times I do during a week, but let's face it, usually by that time of night I'm not worth anything, anyway.
I have to come up with something.
Is there something you want to accomplish, something that, at your End, you want to be able to look back on and see in your life? Something that, as of now, you aren't making much progress in? If so, please share with me what you plan to do to make it happen. Maybe your plans will help me figure this out!
Best wishes to you as you work to figure out your End goals, and know that I'm down here working on mine, too.
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