Like duckpins

Today I am reflecting on the fact that I have set up so many goals in my life - just to see them silently topple over while I am paying attention to something else. I keep lining them up one by one - giving whichever one has won my attention due care and diligence - only to leave and focus on something else. So many currents run through my life - but nothing remains and becomes the one thing I focus on.

I have succeeded, at the very least, at continuing with something. And that is zazen. I am doing a good job of keeping up with running, but without the deadset consistency I have brought to my zen practice. But neither of these things is something I have mastered or excelled at. Of course, I don't need to master anything - that is just as much a conceit as anything else.

Is the issue, then, that I have not kept up with anything that earns me millions of dollars and gets me laid at the bat of an eyelash?

That seems conceited.

Well, this foils my attempt to write a dedicated, focused blog entry. Notice how my original intention to complain about something brought me somewhere else entirely.

Is focus even an issue then? I suppose I have difficulty maintaining the importance of focus. Or anything. I do zazen despite it not feeling important. I simply decided to practice zazen every day until I am dead. Who knows - maybe I can somehow practice zazen after I am dead.

It is very difficult to do anything without feeling that it is important.

It is easy to do something if you don't attach any importance to you feeling important about it.

Maybe that's the key to focus?

Usually, it's portrayed as feeling that something is very important. Is that wrong?

I feel I have a little Steve Jobs inside me - discriminating and bilious and cynical. "That's bullshit." "That's not right." "Try again." But I don't have the part of him that stuck with a project or two at a time and saw it to (relative) completion. Is this a lack in me, or simply a variance in personality, in perspective, in goals?