But for that, I wasn’t fully at fault. Every self-help book, every New Age activity—they all seemed to ask for intentions. We seemed to be throwing the term around so much that it eventually got distorted and expanded until it was almost meaningless.
Intentions are lovely things, but we need to set them with focus, like a target for archery, because, without anything to aim for, intentions miss the mark.
As I pondered all this, something else came to mind: What was the difference between a goal and an intention?
I didn’t get an official answer from the intention experts, but I came up with some loose theories on my own. Mainly, goals were for A-types, intentions were a little more flexible—for people like me, who might be flakier and have more time on their hands to keep setting them. Or for people who wanted to avoid facing the reality of unfulfilled achievements (I was feeling unaccomplished). And, of course, for people from California.
I started asking random strangers about goals versus intentions as well. I was in line at the Comedy Cellar in New York one evening to see Michelle Wolf, comic genius and feminist icon, when I got to talking with a young woman in line named Sarah. She was reading the New Yorker, so I figured she was smart. She looked smart, too. I’m not sure how I went from Do you think we’ll get into this show in the standby line? to Can I grill you about your goals?, but somehow I did. And I had been right to ask.
I’d struck goal gold. Sarah worked in technology, cyber fraud to be exact. (Clearly, she more than just looked smart.) And! Sarah set goals. She had heard of intentions, but she told me that she was more of a goal person. She had a system, too.
She told me that each quarter she made a date with herself. She would take herself out for a nice dinner, at which, in addition to changing all her passwords (which I need to do one of these days), she set her quarterly goals and assessed her past quarter’s achievements. That was serious goal activity. She told me she wrote the goals on a piece of binder paper. Then she folded it up and tucked the list into the back of her Moleskine, always-lined journal, so she could refer to it when she needed to be reminded. Not only that, Sarah would occasionally post one goal on her wall, for reference, when she was feeling off-track.
Note to self: Up Your Goal Game. #BeLikeSarah
Sarah had an interesting take on my main question, too. She was, after all, basically a professional goal-setter. She felt that intentions were less judgmental and more holistic in nature, and that goals were more actionable and specific, designed to be thought through carefully. She also felt intentions might be easier to keep than goals.
That of course resonated with me. Maybe all my intention-setting was a result of my new flexible writing life, and perhaps I was taking the easy road instead of getting serious about goals. As I reflected upon this further (and for months after Lucy and I sat in meditation), I found clarity. I dug out some very old notebooks and journals (not embossed or soft-sided, but practical and goalish-looking) that I had not Marie Kondoed. I realized that I used to set very tight goals. They weren’t intentions. They were direct, state-of-the-art, legit goals, like Sarah’s. There were lists of professional ones and personal ones. They were super specific too, including tidy lists of places to travel to, things to try, and direct, trackable achievements—like completing the New York Marathon.
The New York Marathon was on my goal list for many years. Consider, of course, that I don’t run. Never did, unless you count twice completing the four-mile midnight run in Central Park, drunk, like everybody else, hydrating with champagne and taking a full hour or more to finish. That wasn’t a race. But for some reason, I had set that marathon goal. It looked like fun and such an accomplishment. I applied for years, and, when I finally got in, I deferred for years because, while I walked miles and miles, I hadn’t started training.
Then one year, randomly and for no reason, I accepted. My confidence that day must have been flying high. Of course, I hired a coach, started charting and researching, and found I needed to know every single detail about the race. The year I was to run, the race was canceled due to Superstorm Sandy, but I ran it the next year instead. I could have skipped out on that goal, thanks to Mother Nature, but I didn’t. Instead, I hired another coach and got down to it. Nervous, yes, but I was a finisher, and if it meant crawling across that line, I was going to do it. That was the goal-setter in me.
I didn’t come in exactly last, but I was slow. It was a daylong affair, though of course I stopped over and over for photos and to chat with all my friends waiting for me along the way. I wasn’t going to win that race, so why not have fun? Moving slowly, I remember a man passing me. He was in a wheelchair, working super hard. He had one leg and was pushing himself backwards. He flew by me. That’s how slowly I moved.
Mid-race, after a particularly rough time with my IT band, I set a goal in my head: Beat Al Roker’s time from the 2011 race. That goal was met. I finished in daylight. And a few thousand people finished behind me, according to the stats. Basically, I beat the people who dropped dead along the way.
But, as my acupuncturist said, I still finished ahead of everybody who didn’t run. Holistic for sure. Plus, it was the greatest day ever, and an accomplishment I have often drawn upon to pull me through challenges.
The marathon, as I recall, was my last big goal. And I generated it long before I got laid off. Long before I started doubting my ability to accomplish anything. Later, post-marathon, having completed the mother of all goals, I shifted to intentions. The main giveaway: I wrote my goals-slash-intentions in a soft-sided, purple velvet journal with embossed, sparkly gold stars, and I mostly used stickers and colors and highlighters.
Which made them intentions by virtue of how they were presented.
If Lucy were setting professional goals, in my mind, she was writing them in a more professional leather planner that didn’t look like it belonged to a twelve-year-old girl. I later learned she does professional ones on the computer at work, but her personal ones, which aren’t done with any regularity, are set in her head.
I also surmised that, since it was heartbreaking when I didn’t reach a goal, it was better to set an intention because it felt more fluid and flexible. A failed intention had a softer landing. Plus, my new attachment to the Universe had changed me. It seemed I needed a less rigid inner voice calling me a failure.
Goals, I just wouldn’t have been able to keep up with.
Goals, like dating, suddenly felt exhausting. Certainly, it wasn’t that I had accomplished too much. Was I tired of looking at an unfulfilled list, so I decided to go the intention route to ease the burden? Were goals for the young and optimistic and intentions for the worn-out modern spinster turned Zen addict? Maybe all of the above.
Also, goals (and maybe intentions) added a lot of pressure to life. At Miraval, Carrie, the chief spa group organizer, made a great point unrelated in any way to this discussion or my curiosity about goals. She said that we were at the age where we didn’t need to make a list of all of the things we had to do, but rather it was okay to write down or mentally make a list of all of the things we didn’t want to do.
I loved that idea. I never want to jump out of an airplane. Zero interest. That’s on my I-Never-Need-to-Do-This list. Goals and intentions might add pressure to do the opposite; only the dos make the cut. But Carrie was right. Consider the murky advice of all those books and advisors that tell you to do…what scares you. I don’t need to be scared. Life is scary enough already.
Maybe there is middle ground somewhere, despite the onslaught of noise coming at us to set…set…set…goals.
As I say all this, I know there is still a tiny amount of goal-setting optimism left in me from the old days.
Or maybe I turned a corner without noticing.
When I built my office and Feng Shui’ed the crap out of it, as per the Feng Shui coach, I Googled the height of both an Oscar and an Emmy and then made sure my shelves
had enough space between them to fit either, in case I wrote that screenplay or TV show that won.
Of course, actually writing the screenplay would have also been a good use of time.
Actions Speak Louder Than Intentions
I spent four glorious days at the spa in Arizona with some amazingly accomplished women (so much so, I’ll admit, I felt like something of a slouch by comparison).
Remember the intention I set for myself that first day? To reset?
Strolling around the hilly backdrop of the grounds of Miraval was peaceful. In fact, my usually ultra-brisk, streets-of-New-York pace slowed to a full-on lollygag on day one. I sauntered from place to place, usually half in a coma, coming from a scrub or rub, hike, meditation, or delicious lunch. Some of the people who worked at the spa zipped around in golf carts. When they approached sauntering humans like me, they stopped, at some distance, to let a saunterer go on by without concerns of getting brushed too closely, being interrupted by their movement, or so that, as the saunterer, I didn’t have to stop or modify my walking to let them pass me by.
I noticed it but didn’t really absorb it for a couple of days, because I was in a full Miraval-induced trance. I had indeed reset. The hearings had ended. I had experimented successfully with leaving my phone in the room.
Plus, Lucy and I had both taken a private two-hundred-dollar meditation seminar at which I was given my own personal mantra. The most relaxing part of that learning was that, while I was to meditate twice a day for twenty minutes each time, my instructor told me I could make my coffee first and have it join me in my morning meditation.
But, apparently, the intentions and the meditation stuff had an expiration date.
While I had been fully in the spa zone initially, by the time my final day came around, as I packed my bag and faced the reality of air travel and work and life, my anxiety level was quickly back on red: high alert. The state of spa-calm was apparently a fleeting one. I learned that fast.
Pending reality washed spa-calmness away like chalk on the driveway in the rain. Here’s how I knew:
On this last day, as Lucy and I sauntered along, I saw a golf cart stop to wait for us to pass, as it had for all the previous days. I suddenly felt a little stressed.
Then I snapped.
“When those carts stop like that,” I said to Lucy, “it fucking stresses me out. I feel like I have to walk faster all of a sudden. Like I’m wasting their time. It’s disruptive.”
Lucy at first agreed, and then she suddenly stopped and doubled over laughing.
“We are so New York,” she said. “Here they are doing something nice, that we’re not used to, and it’s stressing us out.”
“I know,” I said. “But why can’t they just brush by me too close and knock my cellphone out of my hand like a normal New Yorker would?”
And there it was: the crux of my spa’ing. Especially as an A-Type. And maybe especially for New York A-types, who are used to walking fast and being bumped around and existing on high alert. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
Maybe knowing that unplugged isn’t my strongest existence keeps me calm; after all, I am what I am.
My wise friend Sherri informed me that in fact anxiety is an advisor, and that high alert can sometimes be a good thing in terms of energizing us into doing something or working toward a goal.
Plus, we can’t be relaxed forever, or we would have to forfeit the most fabulous expenditure available to humans: the spa.
Chapter 11
Any Direct Flight
aging
Writing is my widget, which means that, in order for me to make my widget day in and day out, I need a certain amount of creative energy. When I write someone else’s book, they provide the content (their area of expertise, their diet, their formula for success, or their life story), but the style of their book (the way it is laid out, explained, sidebars, boxes, and wordsmithing), that’s mostly on me. Producing and packaging the news was my thing for Career Number One. Producing and packaging books uses a similar muscle. I have to take a massive amount of information and figure out how best to divide it up into sections and chapters, and how to disseminate it in a way that will resonate with an audience. That’s how TV news worked, too. Just in bite-size portions, not 85,000 words at once.
Usually, getting to the finish line of someone’s book comes following a last-minute week (or weeks or a month) of cramming to meet a deadline. Long, often exercise-less, days that start before the sun comes up and end long after it’s gone down. Extensive rewriting and staring at the glare of the monitor, back-and-forthing with the author, has often taken the wind out of me. Not while I was in it, but once I hit send and my shoulders, which had been sitting up somewhere in the vicinity of my earlobes, dropped. Then, after the adrenaline of the deadline has dissipated, simply put: I am shot.
The feeling of being creatively exhausted is indeed a real thing. My ghostwriter and writer friends have expressed this as well. That exhaustion permeates your entire existence. Anybody who has faced any deadline in any field can probably relate; physical exhaustion along with emotional exhaustion bleeds from your being. Emotional exhaustion can even cause physical exhaustion.
Sometimes, one weekend-long Law & Order: SVU marathon and a giant bag of sour-cream-and-onion chips will wash it away and leave me feeling fresh in the mind, albeit sodium-bloated in the body.
But, sometimes, that foggy feeling leaks into, well, all of life, and I find myself unable to be dragged out of it for a while. When that happens for me, I get stuck, big-time, and find that my long-term and short-term efforts—even with the simple tasks, never mind the ones I’m paid to complete—are utterly stymied.
After one particularly rough patch that included some grueling back-to-back books on tight deadlines (I once wrote one full book in thirty days, start to finish, and I still physically hurt from that years later), I realized I needed some help un-fogging my brain.
Walking wasn’t clearing my head this time, though in the past it had usually worked. Mindless TV wasn’t working either. A jumpstart was needed—creative defibrillation.
A Plunger for the Mind
After some research, the only solution to having written ten self-help books in a row, with no break, seemed obvious: I needed to find a self-help book that specifically focused on creative brain blockage.
After asking around and doing some research, I learned that The Artist’s Way seemed the right choice. Perhaps it wasn’t technically in the self-help category, but decades after it was first published, it sat at number one in the Popular Psychology, Creativity & Genius category, which frankly felt like the prescription I needed to get back to work.
The book’s promise was simple: It would act as Drano for the creative pipes in my head, thereby pushing through the clogs. It almost guaranteed that my creative pursuits would be fruitful, a.k.a., they’d be creatively nurturing and, in turn, I’d make tons of money.
Focus and flair would be restored. It sounded like a dream.
Professionally, things had been fine, but despite all my other efforts, life in general was just puttering along. I felt like I needed a win. I felt like a win was waiting for me and that a little boost would help.
With my eye on the prize of getting back to ass-in-chair-writing, I got aggressive about unclogging, hand-writing morning pages as directed, walking, making an artist date with myself once a week (painting pottery or going to a museum), making time for myself, and treating myself to special things. All of that was doable, though in fairness, as I really thought through what I was doing on my Artist’s Way to a clear head, I realized that I already had a stellar track record for most of what I was being told to do.
When children aren’t part of one’s equation, regular visits to the spa for massages often are.
For single people living in New York, it is basically possible to indulge in a non
-stop artist’s date because museums and art abound every time you step out the door. You don’t even have to try to find it. It’s there.
As for going for a walk, well, I walked. And walked. And walked anyway, for exercise and to soothe my mind. In fact, I have a strict no-changing-trains policy. I would rather walk outside than make the switch underground. Some days, I clocked five or six or more miles on the streets of New York, without actually setting out on an actual walk. It is my mode of transport.
Having said all of that, I did get stumped on one thing in this specific effort: the part of the book that explained that I should do something wild that I had always wanted to do but hadn’t done because of outside resistance (people telling me that I shouldn’t).
For that, I was 100 percent out of ideas. Doing what I wanted was my thing already. My parents had asked exceptionally little of me in that regard, although, after multiple trips to Tulum for yoga retreats over the years, my mother did request I stop going there, as they were “killing Canadians.” (There had been some reports of both Canadian and American tourists being killed by cartels while on vacation; my mom didn’t want me to be next.) A friend asked me to go to a retreat there during the ban, which is still in place, but I told her I could not, as it was literally the only thing my safety-first mother had ever asked of me. My friend said, “So lie to your mother.” I would never. I have never. Mexico to me was like gluten to most of the summer set in the Hamptons—a ridiculous life exclusion that I would avoid anyway. If I lied to my mom and became another murdered Canadian, she’d most certainly be mad at me. And that I couldn’t handle.
Being not rebellious by any measure, I decided that dyeing a red streak in my hair was to be my big, wild, always-wanted-to-do thing. I was hesitant, of course. I was, after all, in my mid-forties, and a red streak felt like a very teenaged rebellion.
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