What’s Your BAG?

Do you even have one? If not, why not?

“Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”

Helen Keller

To my dismay at the time, I was a tad too young to join the peace movement, go to Woodstock or fully understand all of the political humor on “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour”…but not too young to pick up some of the slang in the mid-to-late 1960s. How could one avoid it, when the Mamas and the Papas wanted “Somebody Groovy” and Simon and Garfunkle were “feeling groovy” while we spent our bread, watched the boob tube, and got bummed out or uptight on bad days?

OK, maybe I should have avoided it.

Anyway, while listening to a John Assaraf interview during which he urged people to go after “big audacious goals,” I thought, what a catchy ‘60s-sounding acronym those words made! The title of this post emerged mere seconds later, and the seed for this post was sown.

But alas, the actual article didn’t come to life as easily as the title. It took days of struggling to find the right words, or putting off trying to write any words at all before I realized what the problem was: How could I write about Big Audacious Goals if I felt my own goals in recent years haven’t been big or audacious enough?

Conundrum.

Then I wondered, had this always been the case? Hadn’t I had big dreams as a child, like so many children do? Of course I did.

So I knew that if I work my way through this, I might just rediscover my own BAG.

I remember telling a neighboring mom when I was around six or seven how my friend Chrissy and I were going to be singing on “Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour” (I must have already sensed that this was an aspiration that my own mother would neither encourage nor support).

Then over the next decade or so my Big Audacious Goals evolved based on my growing awareness of the world around me and my own skills and aptitudes.

For the most part, my BAG had always involved writing. I was going to write professionally. Books, articles in big magazines, maybe even as a foreign correspondent for Time.

This BAG somehow survived a host of dream stealers and naysayers until I was well into my twenties.

That was when I hit my first wall. Or what others might describe as “reality.”

I had college loans to pay off. Those, plus the necessity of putting a roof over my head, food on my table, and clothes on my back, led me to believe that I had no other choice than to land the first “real job” I could find. This was followed by a series of “real jobs” that took me further and further from the Big Audacious Goals I’d once had, until nothing was left of them but a vague sense of unease and the constant feeling that, in all of these jobs, I felt like the proverbial square peg.

But here’s the funny thing about BAGs: they may get back-burnered or change shape over the years but, once you’ve had any, they never totally disappear.

Mine has always been to be a writer. And here I am, giving it a go once more.

If you’re identifying with any of this, then I challenge you–just as I am challenging myself–to (re)discover what your BAG is. Name it and claim it. Dig it up, dust it off or redesign it. Let’s make a pact, here and now, to make the rest of our lives the best of our lives. What do you say?

What’s your BAG?

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Note: This article is a modified version of a post I originally wrote in 2014 for my blog, Boomers Who Mean Business.