Everyone has an agenda. For some people it consists of getting out of bed in the morning, after that, ”whatever will be will be”. For others it’s 15 to 20 things to do in the course of the day and a time frame in which to do them. For some others it may be that agenda but in order of importance. So what’s the agenda for the chiropractic profession and the agenda for the different aspects of the chiropractic profession. Fortunately, for some of the profession it’s “chiropractic for the world”. But that’s really not an agenda. It’s more like a dream, pie-in-the-sky. It’s not that there is anything wrong with wanting that. Many of us want that, although it may not be practical or feasible. But even if it were, an agenda is needed to make it a reality otherwise it is merely wishful thinking. It’s like having a GPS in your car but just driving around aimlessly with no destination or worse yet having a destination but never programming it into the GPS. It may tell you where you are but not how to get to where you want to be.
Whatever one’s personal opinion of BJ Palmer, he was a man with an agenda. He wanted to bring chiropractic to the world, by the written word, by radio, by every means possible. He wanted to demonstrate and prove the far-reaching benefits of chiropractic. He wanted to train hundreds of thousands of chiropractors. He definitely had a full agenda. Like many of us, he has so many items on his agenda, that he was not able to accomplish them in one lifetime. He forgot to keep in mind that one lifetime was all he had. Most of us look at BJ and say “I can never accomplish all that” and consequently we do nothing or we are like the guy who adds brushing his teeth and eating breakfast to getting out of bed to his agenda, hardly an adequate agenda for a day or lifetime. I would love to know how BJ made up his day’s agenda and then went about accomplishing it. One nice thing about getting up in years, your agenda becomes more focused. Partly because you develop priorities and partly because you begin to realize your limitations of time and matter.