Neither Can Live While the Other Survives

     With the Disaster Digital podcast season of "Self-Improvement" well under way, I've been spending a good amount of time thinking about goals and goal related things.  What does it mean to have a goal, to reach for a goal, to fail or to succeed.  Some might say that I spend far too much of my time thinking on abstract thoughts for the sake of abstract thought thinking, and those people might be right.  However, I've never had and never will I have a goal to spend less time deep in thought.
    Back to the point... One of the things that I have in common with a lot of other people out there is that I've both set goals and failed at goals.  Few things are as frustrating as wanting to do something, knowing it's within your abilities to succeed at, yet failing to do so.  Not just failing once even, many of us quickly dust ourselves off after the first fail and jump feet first directly into the next fail.  Why? Not why do we try again, giving up without reason is the ultimate fail, but why do we keep failing?  What are the differences between a successful goal campaign and a failed one?  I think I have a few ideas.
     Imagine your life is a puzzle.  Not one of those 25-piece easy-to-complete puzzles, but a 2000-piece get ready to blurt out a bunch of cuss words type puzzle.  As we grow up, the edge pieces find their way together and form the basis of whatever human being we can be.  Whether or not those edge pieces stay in the same spots, there always exists a frame of who were think that we are.  Globs of connected puzzle pieces take shape as we continue putting things together.  The globs sit inside the frame, sometimes independently, sometimes connected to other globs, but they sit there because we put them there, because we think that is where they belong.  Eventually, all we have left are a few small gaps in the puzzle as it nears closer and closer to completion.  The puzzle of life, however, is never complete, such is our struggle.
     In terms of this whole life puzzle thing, what is a goal have to do with any of it?  Essentially, each goal that we create for ourselves has to fit within the frames that we've created for ourselves.  Small goals can fit fairly easily into the holes around the globs, sometimes even connecting and becoming a part of the globs themselves.  The failure causing problems begin to pop-up when the size of our goals out grow the available space from which to put them in.  "This puzzle is only 2000 pieces, how did I get 500 extra pieces on the table!?"

     Here is my point, the title of this blog post that I've been working towards for 5 paragraphs and counting, "Neither can live while the other survives", it's not just an awesome Harry Potter quote.  The fact of what I'm methaporing about is this:  If you have desires for big change in your life, then the you that you want to be cannot exist while the you that you are survives.  Might be a mouthful, but it's just that easy.  The frame of our puzzle is non-negotiable, it doesn't get any larger, because it is  time.  Imagine trying to fit a new 200 piece glob of you into a puzzle that already appears as though it's 1750 pieces complete.  You might think that it fits, at least for a little while, but it doesn't, and that's goal failure.

     If you want to be something, if I want to be something other than what I am, then there is part of me that must... go away, change, or for lack of a better word - die.  Mull that one over in your brain for a minute.  Let's talk again soon.