Catching Life’s Currents/Guidepost Six: The Power of Vacuum

(Paid Subscribers Only) Strategy, time, and the quiet forces that decide what your days become.

In this lesson, we dive into the art of navigating your goals and your time. You’ll explore what it means to live backwards in time like Merlin, uncover exactly how you’re spending your days with a Time Audit, and learn how to MASTER your goals so they actually work. You’ll see how to prioritize what truly matters, schedule effectively without feeling trapped, and put a few foundations under those castles in the air. With exercises, reflections, and practical tools, this lesson gives you a clear path to live intentionally—rather than letting life fill up with other people’s sand.

Let’s begin our lesson with a story…

A lad with two goals once roamed the river. His mother told him to, above all, be nice. And his father told him to, above all, be worthwhile. His goal was to be both of those things.

He managed the first goal very well. He was nice to his parents, nice to his boss, nice to his wife, and nice to his friends. He was even nice to every rat on the river. He was the first person that people called upon for favors. He returned every phone call. He picked up everyone’s mess. Everyone counted upon him to do what was nice because he always did. “Ask the lad,” people would say. “The lad is a very nice guy.” But the lad felt his second goal kept somehow eluding him, and he never had time to figure out why.

One day he met a wise woman who laughed out loud at his dilemma. “You foolish lad. You want to be nice, and you want to be worthwhile, but you have not made time for both.”

“My days are so full as it is. I have no time left over.”

“Whose fault is that?” the old woman cackled. “You’re so busy being nice, you don’t even know what’s worthwhile.”

“There’s a difference?”

“You would ask such a question. Do you think that we have so many different words because they all have the same meaning?”

“I hadn’t considered. Maybe not, but what then is the difference?”

“That depends on how you define worthwhile, and only you can answer that question. I do know one thing for certain, if you haven’t felt it, you haven’t found it, so you had better budget time for looking. Your life can be filled with whatever you decide, but if you don’t fill your life with what you want, you’re gonna keep getting whatever you get.”

The power of vacuum states that nothing on the river stays empty for long, so you’d better fill your life with what you want, before it fills up with everything else.

Source: Lynn Marie Sager, A River Worth Riding: Fourteen Rules for Navigating Life, 2005

So who in this story do you most relate to — the wise old woman, or the frustrated lad?

Unfortunately, for many of us, it’s the lad. We’re busy being nice, running errands for everyone else, keeping our days full—and we rarely stop to notice where all those habits are actually leading us.

The wise woman would remind us that strategy has a natural order: Explore first, Navigate second, Workhorse (Habit) last.

• First, Explore. Like the lad needing to discover what “worthwhile” really means, take the time to look at your life, your options, your challenges, and your desires. Imagine the kind of life you actually want to create.

• Second, Navigate. Once you know what matters, set up goals, structures, and plans that steer you toward that vision. This is your Navigator at work: guiding you, helping you say yes to what matters and no to what doesn’t.

• Third, Workhorse (Habit). Now that you know where you’re going and how to steer, let your habits do the heavy lifting. Train them to support the path you’ve charted instead of leaving them to run your life by default.

When we follow this order, we stop drifting and start moving with intention. We stop being the lad stuck in endless busyness, and start being the wise woman—laughing along with life’s chaos, but steadily steering our own course.

In this lesson, we will:

• Explore what it means to live backwards in time—like Merlin the Magician.

• Conduct a Time Audit to uncover how you’ve actually been spending your precious time.

• Learn how to MASTER our goals.

• Apply a four-quadrant methodology for interpreting and scheduling your activities: Crisis, Quality, Illusion, and Waste.

• Examine the pros and cons of living according to a schedule, and discover how to keep the benefits while minimizing the downsides.

• Take the Personal Commission we designed last week and develop actionable plans and strategies to fulfill it.

---

This lesson is part of a larger learning experience, Catching Life’s Currents: A 14-Week Guideposts Journey, offered to paid subscribers, one-on-one learners, and groups. If you would like to learn more, click here.