What do you want?

What do you want? How many times did I get this questions and how many times did I answer without thinking. And of course these answers change according to your age. In early ages the answers show a heavy tendency into a material direction and are usually projected on toys. This won’t change for some years, just the toys will become bigger and more expensive. Years later the material focus will fade away, replaced by non-material things like happiness, friendship, love, satisfaction. And some more years down the road it will change again, mainly circling around health.

Recently I spent some time with this question and I thought about it seriously, for the first time in my life. It was time to focus on this. And to answer the question what I want in life, I had to answer another question first. What is important to me? So I made a list. Some things I could write down right away, some came to this list after some thinking. To be honest, most of the entries have been clear to me, but some have been a surprise for me as well. And for sure this list will be in a constant flow and change over time. Here comes my current list, the items which are important to me right now:

  • respect, appreciation, trust, understanding, attention
  • happiness and inner peace
  • justice and fairness
  • health
  • an interesting and challenging international job, responsibility, power, influencing and changing the world
  • constant self development, broaden my horizon
  • sports, especially skiing, good condition and shape
  • friends
  • intellectual discussions, experiencing different points of view, cultures
  • fun, smiles, positive attitude
  • well, the list wouldn’t be complete without satisfaction of physical needs

Okay, these things are important to me. Good to know since some of them I ignored within the last years for different reasons. So I didn’t care much about my health, or I don’t have too many friends. In fact there’s only a hand full of true friends and I am lousy in maintaining friendships. Do I like this? Of course not! Do I want to change this? Definitely! So looks like I have already some items for my What-do-I-want list. And in fact thinking about my values helped me to become clear what do I want in life. And here is the outcome, my personal what-do-I-want list:

  • intact partnership, based on trust, appreciation and respect, giving and experiencing unconditional love
  • providing my kids an optimal childhood
  • being best dad ever
  • being best husband ever
  • international assignment, living abroad
  • travel/explore the world, meet new cultures, learn new languages
  • maintain and enlarge a circle of good friends, spend more time with friends
  • develop a more mature character
  • experience my limits, do extreme and unexpected things
  • writing

In some things on this list I am already pretty good, in others I failed in a miserable way. But this is my list and this is what I want. I am very clear about this meanwhile and I am ready to change my live accordingly, even if this will require more drastic steps.

I found my path. It will be painful, but it will lead me back to inner peace. My journey just started. What do you want?