The New Year and the Chinese New Year and the old calendar/astrological New Year have come and one. It's time for Life Goals again.
Life goals are the antithesis of dreams. Dreams are desirable futures that you can't reasonably work your way into, like discovering that you're Harry Potter or getting blown into Oz by a tornado or winning a MacArthur Grant. Or some day having a nice little house on the beach in La Jolla. They're castles in the air, as the VERY bad Madame Merle tells the fathead Isabel in (urg) Portrait of Lady:
“What is your idea of success?”
“You evidently think it must be very tame,” said Isabel. “It is to see some dream of one’s youth come true.”
“Ah,” Madame Merle exclaimed, “that I have never seen! But my dreams were so great—so preposterous. Heaven forgive me, I am dreaming now.”
...
On the morrow she said to Isabel that her definition of success had been very pretty, but frightfully sad. Measured in that way, who had succeeded? The dreams of one’s youth, why they were enchanting, they were divine! Who had ever seen such things come to pass?
And then there are doomed dreams, miscreatures masquerading as goals on purpose to break your heart. These are apparently attainable things you do work your way toward but which the Fates have determined you're never going to get. They are very, very popular with writers and singers because they make the audience cry. Like the little farm and the
rabbits:
"O.K. Someday—we're gonna get the jack together and we're gonna have a little house and a couple of acres an' a cow and some pigs and—"
"An' live off the fatta the lan'," Lennie shouted. "An' have rabbits. Go on, George! Tell about what we're gonna have in the garden and about the rabbits in the cages and about the rain in the winter and the stove, and how thick the cream is on the milk like you can hardly cut it. Tell about that George."
"Why'n't you do it yourself? You know all of it."
"No…you tell it. It ain't the same if I tell it. Go on…George. How I get to tend the rabbits."
Or ever getting back to Blue Bayou, no matter how many nickels and dimes you save:
If you're Roy Orbison, anyway. Linda Ronstadt just might get back:
And then there are the doomed dreams of unrequited LOVE:
Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others...
And, even worse if possible, of requited love, i.e.
Romeo And Juliet. Aida. La Traviata. L.A. Confidential-- Oh, wait. Strike
L.A. Confidential. Someone in Hollywood meddled with the ending.
Anyway, Goals are different. You've got some shot with Goals. Goals aren't going to sweet talk you and romance you and make a lot of promises they aren't going to keep. Goals are MANAGEABLE.
So every year or so, when it occurs to us, my sisters and I and sometimes my brothers get together for Life Goals. We invite all the spouses and partners too, of course, and sometimes they participate too. But the core group is me and Beth and Janet, not their real names because they'd kill me.
Our Life Goals get together is completely misnamed. Goals for a lifetime are way too speculative, even after 60. In the next 18 months any one of us might discover what derivatives are and become a derivatives investor. Pretty silly a Life Goal of reading all of Anthony Trollope would look then. But the Life Goals get together idea is called that because it evolved from How to Get Control of Your Time And Your life, by Alan Lakein, which I read 1000 years ago, and he says you should first make and then refine your Life Goals every year. Also your annual goals. And every month, your monthly goals and every week your weekly goals and every morning your goals for the day. And you should do something every day towards EACH of your goals. In order to avoid goal congestion, Mr. Lakein limits you to no more than three Life Goals and three Annual Goals.
From that megamarket of possible goals, my sibs and I have narrowed our focus to Annual Goals. We meet for a couple of hours, equipped with yellow legal tablets and pens and tea and coffee. I'd love to have potato chips -- they go so well with planning -- but Beth disdains junk food.
Anyone who isn't participating is banned from the room.
First we have to decide on the Goal Categories. We allow ourselves more than three because we don't do Life, Monthly, Weekly, or Daily goals. We usually agree on four or five areas: social, economic, spiritual (or emotional for the anti-spiritualists), personal, health-related, job-related.
For each category, we each come up with one goal. And it has to be a goal, not an action you take towards a goal. "Winning the Pillsbury Bake-Off," for example, is a goal. "Baking" is not. In addition to winning the Pillsbury Bake-Off, planners have vowed to read all the works of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle, start a bridge club, write a novel, become a cold-case homicide investigator (without becoming a cop, ewww,), and become a certified yoga instructor. Four of those have been achieved, too. Also, of course, find a boyfriend/girlfriend (half of a big group came up with that one year) and lose weight (refined to "become healthy!"),
After about 40 minutes of writing and crossing out and side talk about fashion, politics, and food, everybody has a goal for every category. Then, for each category, each person announces her/his goal and explains how they're going to achieve it, AND everybody else comes up with at least one assignment which will help achieve the goal, which the goaler has to write down and promise to at least pretend to consider.
By this point there's paper everywhere and we've all had too much coffee (we abandon the tea in the first half hour). We've exchanged the usual frank sibling character assessments: intolerable know-it-all, bossiest human being on the planet, delusional optimist happy clapper, Eeyore on steroids, unrealistic pie-in-the-sky fathead. BUT we all have Goals. And plans. And ways to achieve them. If we don't lose our notes.