Goals, Values, and Writing Myself into Being
I keep restarting this project - jotting notes from various perspectives but then never quite fleshing them out, wanting to write and yet never making time - and that feels like an awkward and yet key part of this process; of the "mess" or reality, really, of this undertaking.
Part of starting in the middle is accepting that, in some ways, there is no linear path - there is no clear set of next steps or guaranteed linear progression to get from wherever I am now to an agreed upon ending. This goes against almost everything in productivity culture, against the idea of setting out a clear list and making sustainable progress at consistent intervals until the project can be neatly labelled "done." As with all things, there is nuance to this but finding, let alone incorporating, that nuance is a challenge all on its own. Some of this gets brought up every new year or every business quarter when the question of goals/objectives/intentions/insert buzzword here arises, namely: what are you working toward?
Goals often get recommended via rigid frameworks like "SMART" - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Bound. This concept helps break down a nebulous "I want ___ " into concrete and meaningful tasks, which can help with taking an overwhelming vision into lived reality. The downside to this approach is that it also locks in (often but not always) a singular definition of "success" - the goal is either a success or failure.
The process of getting specific is still useful despite this though - it helps determine values and priorities. Priorities are another way of winnowing down the decision fatigue or "analysis paralysis" by ranking a list of actions in order of what is most important. To do this requires taking one step back from the situation, a bit of abstraction, asking- what are your values? ‘Values’ here being another word for what matters most to you? Even if one doesn't have a conscious set of values, there are some subconscious ones ingrained by one's surrounding social context. For example, at the moment I have a number of different things to write, including these posts, some emails, meeting minutes for a board I volunteer for, etc. Every time I sit down to write anything, I am deciding that whatever I am working on is important. For the last few weeks that has been email. I spend some of whatever limited energy I have on a given day dealing with emails and meetings - things that other people depend on me for and that I often offer to do for others. This work makes me happy; I genuinely love problem solving for others, but it also means that I am consistently valuing that work above any of my other tasks. The answer isn't an either/or in this case, it is about trying to balance my value of serving others with my deep desire to write, reflect, and create. I know this on some level, but yet my actions don't actually support both of these - I keep prioritizing and privileging others over doing things that would be helpful for my own existence.
This is where getting specific about my values - naming them and writing them out somewhere - can help. The written list provides a place, a reminder, to check in and see if I am doing things that truly matter to me or if I am constantly just reacting to whatever feels urgent because someone else needs it (regardless of if they really need it in this exact moment).
There are any number of ways and methods for finding your values, but at the moment I feel like I stumble into mine. Nurturing my own creativity is a current value, especially for this space, and I found this by ignoring it for so long that I developing an underlying irritation - the frustration of consistently seeing "write a post" on my to-do list and yet rescheduling it to some date in the future. Personally, I try to revisit anything that irritates me so that either I can: a. fix the problem,
b. pass the issue to someone better able to handle it, or
c. accept that it is a thing I can't change in this moment and move along.
So anything that consistently needles me - like a continually rescheduled task, a pang of sadness when I skip things I love once too often, or a bubbling sense of curiosity - gets examined eventually.
Based on this, here are my current values in this space:
1. Showing up honestly - in all my humanness, no matter how messy, even if I don't have clear answers.
2. Constant curiosity/play - giving myself space to try things, to mess up, to take up and put down whatever intrigues me to feed my never-ending process of becoming - this is me giving myself permission to follow my own intuition about where to go or what to do in a given moment.
3. A place for everything and everything in its place - there is no singular answer for how to do something or what something must look like - everyone, including myself, changes and there are very few truly "right" or "wrong" things. What works for me will not necessarily work for someone else and vice versa, and that is totally fine.
This writing is my own version of the Escher drawing of two hands drawing themselves into being - I am writing my current system and current self into being. Ryder Carrol (of Bujo/Bullet Journaling fame) often talks about having intentions instead of goals, James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) writes of having identities at the core of your goals, others of "manifesting" by speaking into existence. This is me doing all of that - I am writing myself into being a writer, committing to the process of writing regardless of the outcome. This is for the past me, who was quite young, and dreamed of being a writer. While I might have imagined it differently, this is what I am dreaming up now, and both visions have their place and their own value.
This is me actually having to grapple with writing from the middle.
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