I don’t know about you, but I can get a little overwhelmed this time of year with the onslaught of emails and new-letters encouraging me to review my last year of life lived and set goals for the year to come. I hate to admit it, but I really think of the word “GOAL” as a four-letter word (and not the nice kind). I always have.
Now Eric, (my dear husband) loves this word, “GOAL”. He is the type of person who loves those brainstorming sessions ending in a white board full of goals and sub-goals and sub-sub goals. This has caused us to have many teeth clenched conversations over the past 33 years. I don’t want to have more of those painful conversations where I am trying to hold back my consternation and he is trying to lovingly coax me into agreement over goals we can set to ensure our future happiness. It is not that I don’t want future happiness, but somehow goal setting feels like I am being locked into one possible future, but in my mind there are so many possibilities that if written down will limit the capacity to dream of something even better in the future.
As I stated earlier, Eric thrives in a goal-oriented environment. It makes his life feel organized and orderly, (he does come from German and English descent so I guess that makes sense). On the Core Values Index he is an Innovator. Innovators love to brainstorm and find new ways to solve problems. They are patient and can stick with one goal until they see a satisfactory conclusion. This all makes perfect sense to me…but I am wired differently.
On the Core Values Index, I am a Merchant. I am driven at my very core by the need to build relationships and have vision. Now some people who are Merchants would love to have goals attached to those visions, and I am not completely goal averse, but I like to know that my visions can shift and morph as time and circumstance shape them. I like to think of my visions as dreams full of possibility.
So after many years of failed attempts to set New Years Goals, Eric and I have lovingly decided to share both our goals and our visions (aka, dreams) for our future. Honoring both our innate, God-given ways to make future happen. Last year Thomas and Heather (our son and daughter-in-law) wrote about their way of dream-casting the future on a paper-bag. I like this notion because it fits with the non-permanence of the future we can expect or hold ourselves to. I like to imagine a future but also leave some of the possibility to the Divine who might have better ideas in mind for my future. Holding lightly our “goals and dreams” seems to be a happy medium to all this New Years resolution dither that only sets us up for self-loathing and disappointment.
Instead I invite you to take a moment to ponder and dream of what you can let go of, what you want to hold on to and remember to hold it all with a open hand, so that if something completely surprising comes to pass you will have room to accommodate it as well. Happy New Year…may it be filled with dreams, visions and even a few goals met!
