Charging down the path with your blinders on, looking toward that one goal you have your heart set on.
It is all or nothing.
You barely notice who is beside you because you are so focused on where you are going.
You can see the line - it is right there. You are so close.
So you keep going.
Maybe you need to move a little faster. Be more focused. Cut out more noise.
You adjust, reflect, sharpen the strategy and put everything you have behind getting there.
Except the line does not seem to move any closer.
At some point you have to consider that maybe the problem is not your effort.
Maybe it is the line.
We have made goals absolute and rigid.
Pick the thing.
Decide the path.
Stay focused.
Do not get distracted.
And then you measure progress against how much closer you are to the outcome you chose before you had any idea what would happen along the way.
Life does not behave like that.
It evolves. It loops back on itself. Something you thought was finished always comes around again wearing a different face. A person walks into your life and changes what you thought matters. Something disappears or it opens. You change your mind because you changed.
There are no clean straight lines through a human life.
That does not make goals useless. It means we need to redefine where we are headed.
I still need something to move toward. My mind likes to know where it is going. I need to know what I am building and what I am creating. And maybe a general gist of what the outcome could be.
Maybe it’s a piece of an end goal, or maybe it is something so big that I create mini possible end goals in between.
Like a lighthouse instead of a finish line.
You see the flash and remember where you were heading, but you know that there is still all that space around the lighthouse that you can travel through.
And before you decide what lighthouse might represent, there is another piece of work that matters far more than that.
You need to know who chose it.
Because you can create an entire future from beliefs, ideas and standards that actually aren’t even yours.
You can set a financial goal while still carrying someone else’s beliefs about what enough looks like.
You can decide what you want from love while measuring relationships against what you learned to tolerate.
You can create goals for your body from a standard built through shame.
Or you can even build a career around an idea of success you have held onto for so long, that you don’t even remember where it came from.
This is where the shadow work inside MT9 matters.
Before you decide what you want next, you look at what is already running underneath the decision.
What do you actually believe?
What are your standards now?
Where are your boundaries?
There is no point removing one structure and then rebuilding the same thing with different furniture.
You can leave the relationship, job, habit, identity or environment. You can decide you are done with it. But removal leaves an empty space, and empty space does not automatically know what belongs there instead.
That part has to be chosen.
This is why the work comes before the goals.
You take stock of where you are across the nine areas of your life. You look at what exists now, what you have outgrown, what you have already removed and what you have discovered through living it.
Then you decide what belongs there instead.
Not necessarily the exact thing.
The standard of it.
The way you want that part of your life to feel and function. What you are available for. What you are unwilling to keep negotiating with. What you believe now that you have enough experience to make that belief your own.
Then you can create the goal.
And the goal has somewhere solid to come from.
It gives you purpose and direction without requiring you to turn your entire life into a project plan.
You may get there in a way you could never have predicted. The goal itself might change because something better becomes visible from further down the road. One area of your life may suddenly move while another sits still. Something that looked unrelated may turn out to be the exact thing that shifted everything else.
That is how life moves.
There are systems operating everywhere at once, inside us and around us. The body itself is doing thousands of things simultaneously. Different processes, different signals, different functions, somehow contributing to the same living organism.
I find it strange that we accept this complexity everywhere except when we talk about creating a life.
Then suddenly we want a straight line.
MT9 gives the mind somewhere to look without pretending that the route can be known in advance.
The goal says: somewhere around there.
Your standards decide what you will and will not build along the way.
And then you live.
You move, respond, notice, choose again.
The direction remains available without becoming more important than the life unfolding on the way to it.
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MT9 | Spiritual Growth - SG
House of ACIE by Anna Chittick
Lived experience, becomes architecture.
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