Dave Navarro writes a bit about this in his post about not waiting for the goals to cross the finish line:

So the question here is this: Do you really need to take your goals to the finish line to get the results you want? This is an important question. When I started my business, I wanted to make a million dollars so that I could have all the time I wanted to spend with my wife and kids. So I poured myself into building a business, only to discover that years went by without me spending enough time with them, and it’s costing me in big ways, ways I can’t fix with the money I’m making now. And that sucks.

We all make errors in judgment from time to time. It’s part of the larger truism that there is no such thing as balance-as-a-static-state — that balance is always and forever a state of constant motion and adjustment. As long as that remains true (i.e., forever), we human beings will always be subject to retroactive hindsight-driven harsh judgments against our past decisions. Should we have spent more time with the kids? Should we have stopped whining about chores and just done ‘em? It sort of all depends on the outcome, doesn’t it?

So, what I’m wondering today is this: given that an error is always possible but not always foreseeable, that the optimal state of being is not static but constantly subject to tiny and large adjustments, and that I am, like so many of my law-practicing brothers and sisters, highly ambitious and goal-driven as well as desperately seeking a more peaceful and inspired existence — does it not also follow that goals are things to be set and worked towards but simultaneously forgotten?

In short: is it, after all, really the journey and not the destination that matters?

This also ties into another thought that’s been circling round my brain like that green slimy ghostie in Ghostbusters — remember the ballroom, where the slimer kept circling the chandelier? Like that. The thought is this: we’re too caught up in ticking things off some mega-list in search of a state of nothingness, where we really ought to spend our energies embracing the wild, juicy mess that is life.