what have you won?

I spend a fair amount of time trying to figure out what's worth knowing. what's worth aiming at, from a life perspective. obviously there are many short-term goals that are clear and attainable, but the critics disagree on what makes sense for longer-term (lifelong) goals. religious salvation is a common one, but this highlights one of the first criteria that i personally have for what constitutes a 'good' lifelong goal - it needs to be attainable, and to be attainable, you need to be able to *see* it succeed. salvation after death is an honorable and worthy goal, but it doesn't fit the bill for me as the primary goal of one's life, because you won't know if it worked until after you're dead, in the best case scenario.

another criteria is that it needs to be a wide-impact goal. i used to wonder if the goal of life was to attain nirvana (I guess i'm working my way through the religions here). it is attainable, and you can see yourself succeed at it without having to go through the one-way door of death (although some might argue that what you consider 'yourself' is dead prior to attaining nirvana). my biggest reason for shying away from it as The Goal is that it's too personal - if i succeed at finding enlightenment, and i'm somehow still an enlightened drop in the bucket of assholes, that doesn't seem particularly useful to the world i care about. note - people aren't all assholes, i'm not *that* cynical or self-debasing - i just mean that punching a pinhole of brightness in a world that contains so many dark thoughts doesn't feel like the level of success i'm after. if i was Buddha, and could look back to see the far-reaching impact that my enlightenment and subsequent teachings had made on the world, then i might approach the level of satisfaction i'm going for. the reincarnations of Buddha found since then have had an arguably less widespread impact on the world.

it does lead my next criteria though - it must appeal to my impatience. we humans have short lives (relative to how long we'd *like* to live). i believe that sometimes great ideas need centuries to ferment and take hold - even the ideas of Jesus Christ didn't (AFAIK) gain global attention until many years after his death. i want to get some of the pleasure of seeing the success fly around the block a few times before i kick it.

the last criteria - it must be a "good" goal. this is a pretty nebulous concept. i mean 'good' in the sense of improving the world, and/or the quality of life and thought for the people in it. making people happier. making the world safer, more peaceful. helping the world to be in better harmony with itself from an environmental perspective. i completely believe in the concept of Tao. for all things, there is a name, a limited understanding of that thing, that's tossed around as the representation of it by those that refer to it, and that limited representation becomes all people know of the thing, while the reality, the *essence* of that thing remains quietly intact. people forget that the reality of the object or idea is separate from the way we paint it in our mind. that reality is the 'Tao' of the thing in question. this might be totally off-base (i guess it's difficult to discuss the Tao of Tao without making an ass of myself), and i welcome corrections/comments, but this is my understanding of the idea. so, based on that, my meaning is the Tao of 'goodness' should be contained in the goal. i've even thought that a valid life goal could be the pursuit of understanding what Goodness actually is - people have so many conflicting things that they genuinely feel to be 'good', and a thorough understanding of goodness in current thought would allow these conflicts to be moderated with a better feel for the goodness within the opposing views versus the dishonorable sentiments within those views.