On just getting through the year

William Turner, The Scarlet Sunset

On Greg Krech's Thirty-thousand Days site, there's a posting titled: "Setting Goals for the Year that Aren't Totally Self-Centered."  Earlier I've posted about the goal-setting technique.

In many of the workshops I conduct we begin by having people introduce themselves to someone else and as part of that introduction share the three most important things they’ve accomplished during the past year. For some people this turns out to be a very depressing inquiry. They scan the past months searching for something important they’ve done but find that they have little to show for the past year beyond “survival.” Indeed, some participants will actually say that “getting through the year” was a major accomplishment. Most of us would like to finish the year with some sense, in concrete terms, that we’re further along the “road to a meaningful life” than we were last January. But what does that road look like and where is it headed? If we don’t give some thought to that question at the beginning of the trip, we’re likely to end up at some random destination (including one which is not very far from where we started) and then, after the fact, find ourselves dissatisfied with the direction we’ve taken.