The QOLTC book defines Goals-and-Values as “beliefs about what matters most in life and how you should live, both now and in the future.” (p. 173).
I’ve always had trouble talking about my goals and values. They seem to be on the periphery of my vision, always there, but evading direct expression. During my software engineering career, I never could answer that horrible interview question, “Where do you want to be in 5 years?” in a way that felt real.
Perhaps my problem was that I had an idea of goals and values that was too rarefied, too conceptual. I do have strong ideas about how I want to live. Most involve finding the expert means between deficit and excess. I want to be a warm and supportive wife and mother without suffocating my family — neither writing the scripts for my husband and children nor washing my hands and neglecting them. I want to enjoy life’s pleasures but still live simply with as little waste as possible. Ah there’s a goal, every week to roll out to the curb the smallest amount of garbage of anybody on my street! I worked for a summer in college on a German farm. There I learned that water that washes vegetables can also water plants outside the door.
Some people find meaning in life from religion and spiritual traditions. But even people who don’t have religious beliefs can live lives of meaning. In the Goals and Values chapter in the QOLT book, I think this is my favorite stimulus for thought: “The need for secular meaning can spring from the existentialist assumption that since life has no inherent or absolute meaning, we must, therefore, invent one and dedicate ourselves to a meaning in order for our lives to cohere, make sense, or be coherent.”
This week there has been a New York Times story and a Talk of the Nation session on the subject of Life Lists. For those of us who have trouble looking directly at our goals and values, Life Lists can be a fun way to see them out of the corners of our eyes. I may enter something on my list like “Make a quilt.” It’s not the quilt itself that is important to me. It’s that I value dedicating time and patience and care to learning and performing handwork. The quilt is just a manifestation.
