Goal Oriented
November 29th, 2007
I swear I am not writing this just to urge everybody who has ever dieted to go read this Shapely Prose blog entry on the magical thinking that goes into thinking about the life you’re going to have when you just hit that magical number, even though I think it was one of my favorite blog posts I’ve read in a while.
No, I’m writing because I am still trying to sort out what it means to have goals, about the difference between “I am accomplishing” and “I have accomplished” and why the first one feels so much better to me than the second. The end of NaNoWriMo is about 56 hours away as I am writing this (and why I am writing this now?) and I am close, and that does freak me out a little bit, because as long as I only have to focus on a daily goal, I don’t have to worry about what to do with the thing or whether I let anyone read it or whether it is even worth the energy that editing and re-writing it will take. But doing it each day has made me really happy, like the kind of happy I always think I am going to be when that beautiful brown truck brings me my next box from Amazon or the kind of happy I once thought wearing a particular size of jeans would make me.
But I am attached to my goals. One, it has worked for me, at least as an initial motivator — I did start exercising wanting to reach a weight, be all thin and beautiful, started doing morning pages, wanting to turn my impulse to write towards a great American novel. But, the truth is, I exercise because it feels good, keeps me sane, is time to myself each day. And I write morning pages because it is how I sort out what I am thinking and make sense of my life. And these turn out to be as big a part of happiness as being a thin, gorgeous, best-selling novelist might be. I have a list of goals for the house that range from the terribly mundane and short-term, like taking out the trash - to the medium-term, like raking up more leaves and trimming back the vines growing on the house - to the long-term and maybe-never, like getting the basement finished. And I am convinced that if I let go of the to-do list even a little we will all be wallowing in our own filth, like immediately. I recognize that this impulse that makes it hard for us to enjoy a weekend hanging out together as a family — I worry about stuff getting DONE (pity Raven, y’all). And it would be easy for me to draw some zen-y ‘Be Here Now’ conclusion, but it’s more than that, more than thinking goals are important, but habits work better, because they don’t lend themselves to the let-down of having accomplished something I wanted to and finding I am still me, untransformed, living my same life. It’s more than having some happiness to look forward to that is somehow not accessible to me now.
Because all of the parts of my life seem to flow together I have to think about goal-orientation in terms of my kids’ music lessons too. Our violin teacher is motivating our five-year-old with stickers, which goes against all my intrinsic reward stuff, but the stickers are a concrete thing to look forward to when we are practicing each night, I can coax one more attempt out of the child when he hits his “I can’t do it stage” with “Brian believes you will be able to do it if we just keep practicing it every night, and you’re going to get a sticker for doing it.” We don’t do this with my eight-year-old, because the intrinsic rewards are there for him. And I know that he focuses on the weekly goals, the one thing Brian has set out as the skill to acquire this week, but that is not the whole reason for practicing, that each of the boys has expressed something about finding the practicing, in itself, enjoyable. As their parent, I don’t want to let some goofy, Carnegie Hall fantasy goal of my own hide that enjoyment they get to experience each day. There’s something about making music, that you put it out and you don’t get to edit it, re-examine it in morning light — no, you experience it and then that experience is gone, that makes music presentness, puts goals in perspective.
