What if your goal in life becomes to better understand life, but you find life is not about goals, but journeys and the cycles our journeys take us through?

Your intent seems to be to better plan out one’s life and that seems to imply the passage of time, but the narrative is effect, not cause. Time is not so much the point of the present, moving past to future, as it is change turning future to past. As in tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns.

There is only the present, but the present is not just a dimensionless point between past and future, as it is the physical configuration of this dynamic we call energy. Energy is “conserved,” because it creates the effect of time, so it can’t be left in the past, or arrive with the future. There is no “dimension” of time, because the past is consumed by the present, in order to inform it, aka causality.

As effect, time is like temperature, pressure, color, etc. It is just that as mobile organisms, we have this sequential perception process, in order to navigate and so the sequence of time is as fundamental to thought, as temperature, pressure and color are to emotion.

If you really want to grasp life by the horns, it’s those thermodynamic feedback loops you need to understand and ride, not assume you know where they might drop you.

Success is simply more positive feedback, than negative, but the price we pay to feel is that a lot of it will be pain.