Imagine yourself on the deck of a log cabin nestled in the Rocky Mountains.
You are watching a summer sunset light up a spectacular vista spread out before you.
You are sitting in a rocking chair, occasionally rocking back and forth, soaking in the magnificent scenery and marveling at how the setting sunlight transforms the scene before you every five minutes. It is perfectly quiet.
While you are in good health, you are in your eighties, so you know that you have lived the lion’s share of your life already.
As you take in the sunset, you note the parallel in your own life — you are indeed in the sunset of your days here on earth.
You begin to think back over your eight plus decades of life and honestly evaluate what you have lived for, what you have invested your life in, and how you have spent your time, your energy, and your money.
As you sit in that rocking chair, what will you care about most?
What will you not care about at all?
Intentional Living
The view from the rocking chair can be a clarifying force in our lives.
If you are able to keep in mind the things you will care about most at the end of your life, there will be purpose and consistency as you develop plans and make daily choices.
Intentional living is having a purpose, a direction toward an object; it is pointing toward some target or state of a affairs.
We all have some level of intention in our day-to-day decisions. We correct our kids, call a friend, go to the gym, and make dinner, all while having an objective in mind for each activity.
But many of us struggle to consistently line up all our choices toward the same overarching objective. We tend to make choices aimed at a broad array of seemingly unrelated objectives.
This produces an internal sense and outward appearance of being scattered.
If we’re honest with ourselves, most of us find little satisfaction living this way.
The view from the rocking chair can help us align our choices so that they are clearly connected and tangibly moving us toward a desirable outcome.
