How do any of us improve at anything? What are the strategies for reaching our goals? How do we contend with the voices in our heads that bemoan, “I want that, but…?” “I could do that, if only….” “Things will never change for me. I’m not lucky like her.”

What if, instead of flooding our systems with thoughts of resistance and disability, we just decided to aim at something and move toward it? What if we pointed at what we want, or more importantly how we want to feel and who we want to be, and go from there?

Do you want to be more organized? Fold your clothes and put them away. Do you want to be more learned in a subject? Watch an educational video or start a course. Do you want to inhabit a leaner, faster body? Pick one healthy food to incorporate into your menu today and take a short walk or do an exercise—a short one. Whatever it takes. The action doesn’t have to be grand, it just has to be.

The changes we seek will likely require more than one meal or exercise or book for us to actually realize them. But the point is, we just have to point and start and then commit to consistent practice.

It is in the practicing that we both reinforce our aim and desired goal as well as move physically, energetically, and spiritually in the direction of our future selves. With hearts and minds raised to what is to come, we actually experience the future in our present. We are at once living in the isness of the now and witnessing the life spark of pure potential.

Just as the budding flower stretches toward the sun in order to generate the life force and inspire its opening as a full bloom, so do we benefit from such an aspiring posture. For us, our vision, our dream, our goal, our aim, these are our sun, our star.

All wisdom traditions teach us to gaze upward, look ahead, in effect, to aim high and start moving.

Just imagine what we could become, individually and collectively, if more of us decided what elevated versions of ourselves we wanted to become and then practiced them?