Keep setting goals for yourself

A friend of mine recently boasted that her 14-year-old daughter was setting goals for herself. “She knows what she wants to accomplish. Isn’t that wonderful?” her mother said to me.

“Yes, it is,” I answered. Her comment made me wonder about goal setting in general. Shouldn’t everyone set goals, even at retirement age? Sometimes all we need is the right motivation.

My sister Susan’s dream, ever since she was a teenager, has been to quit smoking. To our family’s delight, at the age of 61, she has now gone two months without a cigarette. What motivated her to change after 43 years? She fell deeply in love with a man who wouldn’t abide by it.

“There are people who put their dreams in a little box and say, Yes, I’ve got dreams, of course I’ve got dreams. Then they put the box away and bring it out once in a while to look in it, and yep, they’re still there,” wrote Erma Bombeck, humorist and newspaper columnist.

Sound familiar?

When I was in high school, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I set a goal to publish my first novel by the age of 30. I longed to see my book on the shelf of the public library and to hold it in my hands and carry it to the checkout counter.

Teaching became my chosen occupation simply because it was steady income. After the birth of my second child, I quit teaching for a while to resume my passion. Despite success, it became apparent that a part-time writer could not afford to send her children to college, and so I returned to the classroom.

When my mother died in 2003, I began a novel about the love of the two people who bore me but whose addictions prevented them from accomplishing their goals. The tagline reads, “A family struggles with one member’s alcoholism and the chaos it creates in their lives in this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel.”

At long last, my story “Find Me Alone” will be published soon and available on Amazon.com in early summer. My deadline is off by about 32 years, but what does it matter? My motivation was simple. Stop whining and finish it before I die.

I have many retired friends whose goals are being realized now that they have time to do what they really want to do. Artists, writers, poets, musicians, and cyclists. We all had to set goals in our professional careers, and now we get to set personal ones.

Remember the aging aunt and uncle I wrote about a few weeks ago? Her goal after hip replacement at 90 was to still go to Aunt Bee’s diner for her daily coffee and breakfast. One egg over easy, bacon crisp and dry toast. She got her walker across the parking lot and sat in her booth last week.

Calvin Coolidge said it best: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

To all the folks who are signed up to cycle 30, 50 or 100 miles in the 2017 Ocean to Bay Bike Tour on April 29, I wish you the best of luck in accomplishing your goals, but remember (dear beloved husband), completion of the ride is optional.