About a week before the start of every new year I make resolutions. Carefully I think about my goals and make a lengthy list of expectations.
Before the new year’s start I sit down and take stock of the closing year and always seem to conclude I had far too many expectations — with too few successes and too many failures.
My expectations were too high and too many, and my failures too many. I thought to myself, what can I resolve to do for the next year that might show more wisdom about how best to live (after all, learning how best to live is what ethics is supposed to teach)?
The answer was clear: Simplify!
The question for the new year then arose: Why are you here? Or, more simply: What’s your life purpose in a sentence?
One book that helped me a great deal to think about my life was “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor E. Frankl, a Holocaust survivor who had learned how best to live in the most horrible situations. He believed that having a reason or purpose in living was what enabled people to survive even the worst situations. Frankl became a psychiatrist whose book sold over 10 million copies and is considered a classic.
Ironically, I was back to an exercise I used with students in my ethics classes when they were writing their books of life and trying to summarize their life missions.
I would ask each student to complete this sentence: I am here to ___________________________.
I was usually surprised by how quickly and clearly many completed the sentence. They knew why they were here, just never had stopped to think about and express it.
It didn’t take me long to complete the sentence for a guide for my next year’s resolution: I am here to help other people figure out why they are here. Strangely enough, this life mission summarized how I had spent my life already as a teacher and writer.
Here’s a suggestion you might try for the new year—complete this sentence on a piece of paper and save it to review as the next year dawns: I am here to ————————
John C. Morgan is an author and teacher whose columns appear in this newspaper and others.
![We’ve arrived at 2024. Every new year elicits a combination of anticipation and dread, especially in these turbulent times. That’s especially true in presidential election years. We’re still dealing with the fallout of the tumultuous election of 2020 and the conflicts that followed it. It looks quite likely that we’ll be seeing a rematch between […]](https://www.thereporteronline.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/GettyImages-1486290488.jpg?w=583 "We’ve arrived at 2024. Every new year elicits a combination of anticipation and dread, especially in these turbulent times. That’s especially true in presidential election years. We’re still dealing with the fallout of the tumultuous election of 2020 and the conflicts that followed it. It looks quite likely that we’ll be seeing a rematch between […]")
