The Direction of Intention

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I sat with Stephen and his mother in my office. They came in once a week so I could review Stephen’s schoolwork and together we’d set goals and identify assignments for the next week. Stephen had Asperger’s, a form of autism. I’d worked with him for many years. He’d been in several of my plays and recently I’d taken a job in an independent learning center so I was his teacher overseeing his studies. He was a senior and the last time we met he wanted to talk about what he might pursue after high school. He told his mom and me that he wanted to be a disc jockey! He loved music and his enthusiasm was palpable so we set him up with an internship at the local radio station.

Now, as we sat in my office, Stephen was upset. He’d been surprised that the duties of his internship were something other than hosting his own radio show. He thought he was going to go to the station and launch The Stephen Show and was surprised when he was only able to assist the people in the station to produce a radio show. His mother tried to explain that no one hosted a show on day one. I listened as she explained again to him the need to learn the equipment, the roles and responsibilities of all the people involved, of how to record and edit.

Stephen listened patiently and then said, ‘I know all that. I just want to jump to the end.” We laughed heartily.

I think of that conversation often when I work with people – that would be most of us – who just want to jump to the end without moving through the beginning and middle; we want to be “there” at the expense of missing “here.” To be in such a hurry to achieve the goal and never fully comprehend that this goal is not an end but the beginning of the new goal. The riches are here, no matter where you are in the arc toward your idea of fulfillment. “There” will someday come and I’ll wager you, like all the wise old souls I am privileged to know, will reminisce about the times that you missed speeding to get somewhere that didn’t exist.

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