What are your goals?

What are your goals? and not just training goals. That's what the young man who trains me in weightlifting asked me this week. At 70, your goal is just to get on with life. But a goal when achieved isn’t as satisfying as the aim of achieving it. See Bisy backson in the "Tau of Pooh". "Goal" sounds like it relates to physical training, like achieve my next Dan grade at tae kwon do, lift a heavier weight. What's the difference between 'goal' and ambition'? Opportunities allow to you achieve your goals. In January 2020, I identified lots of experiences I wanted to achieve.

Is wanting to achieve an ambition?

One of my earliest ambitions was squashed when I was six. My mother's ambitions for me were that I get a job that would support me whether or not I married. So nursing, civil service clerk and teacher were deemed suitable. The goals to achieve such careers were to get five GCEs. My school put me in for seven GCEs of which only four qualified me these careers. My mother arranged private lessons so I achieved the goal. I went to teacher training college, and the goal was only to complete those three years. 

A longer-term goal that I'd had since I was nine, was to go to India and see Rusi Uncle - achieved in 1975. I told a fellow teacher that had been something I'd wanted to do all my life and her reaction was, "But once you've achieved it, what are you going to do for the rest of your life?" Well, I wasn't putting off achieving what I'd wanted to do for nearly 15 years at 23 just because I might have more years of life. I responded that I'd find something else to aim at. I went again to India in December 2007 and I'm going again next month on my way to Bhutan. >But when you get past youth, your goals change. In middle age, I had one at 44: to raise our children by myself. Then I had only to worry about my mental health, my health so my children were safe, how to manage money and eventually what to do when they left home. I remembered a discussion with their father, who hadn't completed his DPhil, and I had no degree when we married. I told him I'd change my name to his when I completed my doctorate. A few years later I'd completed my doctorate. Sad that he wasn't there to see, but our children and their stepfather came with me to celebrate the achievement.

In old age, you've achieved most of your life's ambitions, and as you get older, your goal is almost just one year at a time, one month at a time, one day at a time. Just keep healthy. However, I have a new goal: to qualify as a t’ai chi teacher. And the training is fun, just challenging enough and the teachers and the colleagues I am training with are inspiring.  I’m not going to teach t’ai chi for money. Money is not my goal. At my age, I just need to keep healthy, fit, happy, sociable. So, I'll teach and practise with friends, so we keep us all healthy, fit, happy and sociable.