Day 4,066

I first picked up Life Lived Wild by Rick Ridgeway in June of 2024, and I’m now reading it for the fifth time. Each time there are little nuggets and anecdotes I pick up that the Mike from previous readings wasn’t quite ready for, but the Mike of today is.

Today it was a passage where Rick contrasts his late wife Jennifer, who was so present in every moment of her life, with his own constant focus on the next goal:

…I began to realize she lived more fully in the moment than anyone I had ever known. It was how she went about her daily rounds… It was so different from the way I went through my days, focused on my goals and along the way developing a habit of believing that things would get better once I had completed the next expedition or finished the next book or made the next movie.

“You are always waiting for Godot,” she had told me, offering no other comment or explanation.

— Rick Ridgeway, Life Lived Wild

In past readings I breezed right past that line. This time I couldn’t. I read it, re-read it, and re-read it again.

In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, two men wait day after day for someone named Godot to arrive. He never does. The waiting becomes their whole life.

What struck me was the dissonance. In so many of Rick’s stories he is intensely present: climbing a mountain, paddling a wild river, sharing a tent with friends. How could he feel he didn’t live the way Jennifer did?

Then it landed for me. I feel I’m able to stay present and appreciate the moment rather than wishing it away, yet I’m also very goal driven. I long to work toward a dream, and then another, and then another.

Where’s the right balance between the two?

If I’m only present, do I grow into the person I’m meant to be? If I’m only focused on the next goal, how much of the now am I missing while I look toward the future?

As I’ve built my annual planning process, Life Topography, which I’m launching publicly for the first time in January, I keep running into this same crux. I seem to need goals and dreams to work toward, but living into the intention of the dream seems more important than achieving the dream itself. I keep coming back to this thought: “The point isn’t to check the box, the point is to live the life the box was meant to check.”

As luck would have it, my used copy of Life Lived Wild is signed by Rick, with this inscription:

The goal isn’t the summit, it’s the footsteps to get there.

Rick Ridgeway’s inscription in my copy of Life Lived Wild

I would love to talk with him about that line. It feels so close to where my mind has been going. Maybe Jennifer’s point was never that Rick had too many goals. Maybe it was that he kept putting his contentment on the other side of them, waiting for a Godot who would never arrive.

I’m still not quite sure how the accounting works. When is it time to dream big and grow into the next goal? When is it time to pause, soak in the present, and trust that life will unfold without me constantly trying to shape it? Or is finding that perfect balance just another Godot I’m waiting for, when perhaps the tension itself doesn’t need to be resolved?

My mind loves paradoxes like this so much, much to the chagrin of my contentment and sanity!

Today I’m thankful for a book that keeps meeting a different version of me each time I read it, and for a few words written to a stranger that somehow found their way to my bedside table.

Thanks!!!