Midnight Mutterings | Goals vs practices

From Dictionary.com: Goal and practice:

Goal: ’First recorded in 1325–50; Middle English gol “boundary, limit”; further origin. The result or achievement toward which effort is directed; aim; end.

Practice: repeated performance or systematic exercise for the purpose of acquiring skill or proficiency.’

I’ve never been attracted to goals. I can’t remember setting any goal or achieving one. Once in a while someone has asked me what my goal or goals are and my reply, at least in my head have varied from ‘huh?’ to ‘goals?’ Out loud, even if I’m feeling polite, the most I can say is ‘I don’t really do goals, I guess.’

To me a goal, at least for myself, has an end point, a time when the goal is met and therefore, not needed any more. A practice, though, is ongoing. Is its own reward.

If I were to believe everything online, I might believe almost everyone has a ‘goal’ of ‘losing weight.’ I’m unclear about what that means when the goal is arriving at a certain body weight, apparently a lot less than one’s weight at the starting point. Then the goal is achieved (generally at considerable effort and cost) and therefore, one can check off ‘lose 30 or whatever pounds,’ never to think of it again. Which would likely lead to gaining weight forthwith with hardly any effort.

I understand achieving goals in sports, although I’ve never tried it myself. Although, even in sports, once a goal is achieved, then the end point is reset, and there are more goals to achieve. Many, many more goals…

I do understand practices, however, though I haven’t been especially successful in following through on many of the practices I have started or planned to start.

Sometimes, someone will have an academic goal, like graduating high school or ‘earning’ a PhD. I did not have such goals, and possibly, as a result, in spite of enrolling in both such programs, for years on end, I achieved neither. Both have faded in my memory quite a bit by now. I did go to high school for a few years but graduation alluded me. At the end of eleventh grade, I thought I’d had enough and applied to college, not really understanding that admission was unlikely. They must have assumed I had graduated high school given that I was applying to college. By then I had enough credits, save one English class that I took in summer school. Apparently no one checked. I wasn’t a very good student or particularly bad either. I rarely did my homework, but I did go to class most but not all days, and I often enjoyed class, I just couldn’t see another year of it. I applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 30 miles up the road from where I lived, only to find out that women (‘girls’ at the time) couldn’t go there as freshmen (?freshgirls) except in certain majors, that is: nursing, pharmacy, physical therapy and medical technology. I didn’t aspire to any of those professions, though I did like science as well as English. I wasn’t great at history and math was a little dry with it’s strict rules and expectations, so I opted for nursing. Somehow I was admitted and I dutifully successfully completed a whole semester without much enthusiasm. It seemed we didn’t learn much beyond how to defer to physicians and other basic social skills required in the field. My grades were ok in the watered down science classes. I liked biology and bacteriology (now called microbiology) with the petrie dishes and microscopes, but I only earned a C in bed making. Yes, it was a course and I learned to make hospital corners and toe pleats (needed for patients with arthritic feet), but apparently not all that well. The chemistry was a bit watered down. And I had to live in the ‘nursing dorm’ near the hospital. Most of my classes were on the main campus and with my geography deficit, I spent more time looking for my classes than actually attending.

Somehow, I learned about the medical technology major. The science wasn’t as watered down and there were so few female students that both of us could live in the real dorms with the big girls. So I switched majors and actually graduated on time with a BS in what was virtually a pre-med curriculum. However, there was an additional year in which we were to learn how to do actual medical technology tests. Blood and urine tests, biochemistry tests, Pathology and microbiology tests and (yikes) parasitology tests. After that there would be a big exam and we could get licensed. But again, I had had enough and ran off to New York to work in a research lab at Columbia University Medical School. The fact that it was a one person (me) lab and I didn’t know much was a bit of a problem, but I met some other lab techs at the end of the hall who were great about teaching me how to do my job, which included walking my boss’ dog Mitzy (I’m not sure how she spelled her name) and writing his research papers, which I was pretty good at. After all I had actually planned and carried the research. Only my typing was substandard. Still is.

Well this had gone on long enough. I did actually finish a master’s degree in teaching, back at Chapel Hill, where my second child was born, after I had another lab job in nuclear medicine at Duke University, hand tagging radioisotopes and autoclaving them so that they could be injected into actual patients before they (the isotopes) decayed and became useless. I now think the exposure to radiation was more dangerous than it needed to be and may have contributed to the two cancers I developed later: the first in my natal family. So when the chance came to get into the teaching program with a big stipend, I jumped for it and actually finished the program and got a teaching degree.

I know this is tedious and I even skipped the lab work in Detroit after I finished the hematology part of the med tech program before we moved again. Hematology was extremely interesting and I’ve used what I learned several times in helping diagnose family and friends with terrible, rare diseases. Yep, I can read your lab report and give you the bad news. Most of it anyway.

After that it was the west coast where I was a substitute teacher until I applied to grad school again, this time to be allowed to stay in student housing instead of becoming a faculty wife at a Catholic women’s college a little bit north. There I did almost everything, even collecting my data and passing my orals, but took a job on the east coast and never submitted my dissertation, Typing again my nemesis. Sure I could have hired someone to type it, but there was more organization of the data, etc. A goal would have been good. A practice to work toward that goal even better. A timeline with small goals, leading to a product. But I was then as now undisciplined and disorganized. And also, not ambitious.

Just as writing this little column goes into the night every two weeks because I haven’t started it early, made and kept a schedule, set a goal, followed a practice and sent it off to Lin before midnight on a Friday night like tonight.

Even so, I do have some practices if few goals. I walk the beach and the road every day. I cook and eat good healthy meals about five times a day. I keep up with a few house chores daily, and neglect more. My affairs and my house are not in order. I cannot die yet. The disorder left behind would be too embarrassing.

I am having a good time. I’m practicing a good time. The sink is always clean. I pay most of my bills on time. I keep up with the laundry I run my little business, sometime to a small profit. The cats, when I am with them, are fed on time, and petted often, even if they don’t deserve it. The grass needs mowing. The deck needs power washing. The car needs washing, and there’s a little note that says ‘Maintenance Needed’ on the dashboard but not what that means. I’ve got books to finish reading. Files to organize. Emails and texts to return. Borowitz columns to read. I’m still more interested in practices than goals, although I didn’t explain it very well here. Not my goal, apparently.

I did recently read a book: Atomic Habits by James Clear and he cleared up things a bit for me. He said something like, if you can’t do the whole thing, like walking a mile every day just walk around the block. Then you might just go farther. You know, it works. Sometimes. Weeding the garden is too big a job. Why even start? But if I weed around the broccoli, maybe I’ll weed around the onions too. They really need it, and it’s nice out there beside the beach, even in the light rain.

Should have read James Clear sooner. Instead of looking at the stacks of paper that need sorting. I could just pick ten off the top of the pile and file them. Baby steps. Practicing. I could do that right now, right after I send this to Lin. Maybe just five papers. It’s late.

I do realize most of you figured out all this a long time ago. Because you are adults. Good for you. And maybe that OCD helped too. Not you, specifically, but some other people you know. I’ve been praying for just a touch of OCD for myself. Probably not systematically enough.