I was going through one of my old journals when I found one of my favorite quotes:
“Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no matter how small or in what form, the sense of activity going step by step to some chosen end across a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading nowhere.
But the work of building a path was a living sum so that no day was left to die behind her, but each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding tomorrow.
A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there’s nothing but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.
The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make?
It is not proper for man’s life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him–man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”
– Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged (Emphasis and line-breaks are mine.)
We all need linear goals in our lives to rise above the monotony of circular lives. That is the only way we have to show something at the end of the day.
Twenty years ago, I chose to write as my linear goal. It has not only kept me sane through the madness of the daily grind but also has given me a purpose in life.
Initially, I had little goals such as writing childhood memories, remembering those sounds, smells, and scenes from the past, and learning to describe them. Soon I started attending courses. The first one was a Life Story Writing course. An offshoot of that was a writing group that still has been meeting in my home for the past fifteen years.
I joined another writing group and practiced reading my writing to others.
Encouraged, in 2014, I joined a novel-writing course A Year of Novel at ACT Writer’s Centre. Five of the writers from there continued to meet after the course to continue working on our novels. We are still meeting and critiquing each other’s work.
In between, I won NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) twice, wrote several short stories, and started two blogs.
With writing as my linear goal, I am achieving little milestones just like Ayn Rand said in the below quote:
“[A] man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station…”
