The other day, I mentioned mission statements. Back when I taught at community college, my students were fixated on, "OMG, I have to get this degree so I can get out and get a job and pay back my student loans." Good child of the 50's and 60's that I am, I wanted to challenge this circular logic and at least give them a chance to consider the bigger picture, and we did a class exercise on creating personal mission statements. After a class discussion and work in small groups, they would write one clause for their "mission" vis a vis changing the world (ie: "I want to help people improve their health...") and then a second clause where they would pinpoint more specifically how they wished to do this ("...by teaching yoga and nutrition classes"). This seemed to be a good model for getting them out of personal panic mode and encouraging them to do a small measure of universal thinking. I hope that it helped at least a few of my students.
For months, I've been feeling that despite a sense of having entered a new "stretch of river," I'm stalled from having lost sight of my own goals. So over the weekend, I worked on a new mission statement. I was pleased with it at first. It seemed weighty and earnest. I sensed that people looking at it would be impressed with my gravitas. I walked away from it for 24 hours, and then came back to it again.
And darned if I didn't immediately see that, for all intents and purposes, it was my old mission statement. Indeed, I suspect I "wrote" this one before birth: to advocate for the rights and values of girls and women, by taking steps to enter a previously all-male musical field; and by living independently with as much integrity as possible in a place of love, sharing, learning, freedom, non-competitiveness, non-consumer-focused beauty and peace. Tilting against windmills has been challenging, extremely uncertain and lonely, but overall, I feel that I've fulfilled this mission as best I could. I can't imagine anything I would have done differently, at least.
But I think without my realizing it, I've literally reached "retirement" and the winding-down of this mission, which would be fine if my lifetime were at an end, but hey, some people in my family sail well into their nineties. If I potentially have thirty years ahead of me, my new mission statement absolutely needs to be just that, new, otherwise I may literally die of boredom!
Many spiritual teachers say that, in effect, our only "mission" is to be happy, joyful, loving and passionate, and to share those qualities with the people around us. With every new daily outrage in the news, it has been hard to access these beautiful qualities at all, much less focus on them or see them as enough. And yet, maybe 60-something is a perfect time to start melting, to cast aside the serious black-and-white "me-against-the-world/change-the-world/fix-the-world" mentality, and simply ask, what is fun for me? Where am I happy? What pastures are now turning spring-like green? What kinds of people do I love? What piques my interest these days? What in me has changed in the last thirty or forty years? What has remained the same? My boat has started to move fast, but I'm still kind of hanging off the stern, so this week, I am going to try to write another mission statement, and see if it gets me caught up with me. I'll keep you posted, as always(!) You are seriously the most patient, wonderful people in the world.
