A couple weeks ago at dinner – in the middle of sharing his vision for Zaadz – Brian asked me to tell him my ultimate goals.

A couple weeks ago at dinner – in the middle of sharing his vision for Zaadz – Brian asked me to tell him my ultimate goals.

That’s always been a hard question for me. I could never come up with a set of traditionally important goals – such as ‘earn a living and give lots of money to charity’ or ‘start an incredible business providing tools to help people improve their lives.’ Some of those have crossed my mind, but none seemed to really fit… none seemed so important that I could call them an ultimate goal.

And then someone from the UK who’s rapidly becoming a very good friend of mine asked me the other day, “Am I a project?” She had read “Being who I am”:http://jacob-stetser.com/play/entries/doc/bein…, a post I wrote almost two years ago. I reread it the other day…

“What if – just what if – instead of always diverting this energy for ‘projects’ and expressing it in brief but intense bursts of fiery emotion, I learned to harness the energy in my daily life for the motivation and drive it’s always given me, and to use the energy as fuel for a more alive, more dynamic sort of relating to others?”

Even then, tormented by my own intensity, I’d begun to see what crystallized for me during the time I’ve spent in Maui, and especially over a vegan vietnamese dinner in Paia… and which I wrote to the Zaadz team in my introductory email:

“I’ve learned over the past few years that my skills – professionally and personally – lie in integration and facilitation. I’ve always been fascinated by how to bring all sorts of disparate elements together, whether I was studying philosophy or religion, programming or usability, or just dealing with other people. I feel an incredibly strong pull to create an atmosphere in which incredible things can happen, for myself and for the people around me: growth, breakthrough, enlightenment.”

Until recently, I’ve been assuming that the only correct path for me lay not in integration but in individuation: in finding out who I am apart from my interactions with other people. Yet, though I have my own interests (hiking, Ruby on Rails, web development, writing, etc.), I find my true path through interaction, through support, through love.

So, dear friend, no, you’re not a project… quite the opposite: the intensity and intimacy with which I interact with close friends, something that scared me witless for many years (and because of that fear was unbearably intense when active and almost undetectable when I looked the other way), is the very core of who I am… in a sense a mirror, a magnifying glass. I find my happiness through pursuing my own life while helping you reach your own dreams.

I’m smiling because gradually since I moved to Maui and rapidly since I told Brian that I’m a facilitator – a being who helps other people reach their own greater selves, the storms of which I was so afraid have calmed – no less powerful but perhaps eased by the knowledge that I’ll no longer be resisting who I am.

And if all that’s a hokey bunch of New Age jumble, understand it this way: I love creating an environment that helps other people achieve their own highest goals. That’s where I’m happiest.