Evaluation: asking questions and doing something with the answers

I live in a rut. My view from here is a dirt floor and two dirt walls extending as far as the eye can see. My initial evaluation of my situation makes me tired. I can definitely climb out of this rut and do things differently. Yet that would require asking hard questions, making difficult decisions, and investing time and resources into something less predictable than this rut.

Don’t get me wrong or hear this as a complaint about the rut or some kind of creepy cry for help. I am truly blessed. But in my sixth decade of life on this planet, I still have dreams.

Some of you know that my choice of the word “dreams” has significance. I almost always prefer “vision” over “dreams.” My self-imposed working definition of “vision” is a dream with a clear or emerging path to achieve the dream.

I know dreamers. Wonderful people. Hearing them talk warmly about their dreams is a pleasant experience for all of us within earshot. With some of these folks, you can tell that their dreams will always exist in the land of unicorns and cotton-candy rainbows simply because they will never do anything to achieve them. This does not make them any less wonderful. Although, if the dreamer is someone in your life who is supposed to be leading or making something significant happen, watching dreams die a slow death is truly frustrating.

When you live in a rut, you can have dreams. And unless life has really beat you down, rut-living can be an awesome inspiration for many, many dreams.

For a good part of the almost four years I have been in my sixties, I have made a point of telling people that I am getting old. I do that to some extent because I want to acknowledge the gray and absent hair, the hearing loss, and the embarrassing slide to rut-living contentment I sometimes feel. But my dreams plague me. And, upon further thought, they frustrate me because few of them connect to vision anymore. There are no clear paths ahead for some of these great ideas or zany inspirations.

I often counsel younger individuals to evaluate — to ask questions and then to be honest about the answers that come. Without evaluation, rut-living becomes pretty appealing. Ultimately, it becomes an excuse to stop planning and, in essence, stop engaging in making the world a better place.

So, if you’ve been my next door neighbor in Rut World, won’t you join me in some good old-fashioned evaluation? If you read the news, you know that there is a deep need for people with vision. Let’s be part of that movement.