A Course in Miracles refers to a fearless self inventory and evaluating where you are with your yearly goals seems much like that.You gotta be a little fearless and you also need to take a good look at yourself to see what you’ve got and what you don’t.

Taking an inventory of what you said you’d do and comparing that with where you are right now is enlightening. I had the “luxury” of having written it all down. My expectations weren’t amorphous or ethereal or things I just held in my mind. I got down and dirty with my goals, I wrote them down, I made a vision board, I waxed poetic in my Project Awesome document. I have a theme for the year, for heaven’s sake. (Boundless) I went Vegas style — all in.

It’s really great, mostly, because there isn’t any fuzzy memory or hedging that you can do when your promises are staring back at your in black and white or, in the case of my vision board, in glittered puffy paint, 118-point type fonts and larger than life photos.

I had it all right there in front of me. So how’s it going?

Intentions for the year
* Read 25 books (I haven’t really counted how many I’ve read… at least 4 or 5)
* Do something creative (color, paint etc) at least 1 time a month. (I did really well with this until about April.)
* Do Loving Kindness Meditation at least 5 days a week. (I haven’t always done LKM but I have meditated most days of the week and often have gone several weeks without missing a day.)
* Do one fitness challenge a month. (I am in the middle of a fitness challenge right now but I have missed months for sure)
* I will start each day with sun salutations, meditation and gratitude journaling. (I’ve maintained this habit consistently although certainly missing days)
* On the weekend, I will run early, run first. (I am known for wasting half the day getting motivated to do a long run on the weekends. So this year I have pushed to run first thing. It’s been a great commitment to have)
* I will log 1,700 miles this year (As of a few days ago I am a little more than 800 miles in for the year)

After I typed these all out I thought, “What was I thinking?”

But after I settled down I realized that I am doing one thing that was most important in my Project Awesome, my intention manifesto:

Don’t worry about how far you go but that you are not standing still.

I look at all these goals and some I am doing daily, with little waver. Others, I am still pretty far off the mark. But I can say, without crossing my fingers behind my back, that I have made movement on all of these.

If December 31 were today would I call it a rousing success? No. But I could say I’d given it effort.
I was a little fearful about putting down what I’d done next to what I had hoped and seeing their disparate markers. But it wasn’t that bad. It was a reality check for sure but I actually feel hopeful because I have 6 more months to make things happen.

Normally, I only do this compare/contrast in late December and it’s finite. I don’t have any more days left to make it different. But in this case I do! And so do you!

It’s not about finding perfect, hitting every goal but moving in that direction, moving forward, MOVING at all. I think I’d feel worse coming to a year’s end and realizing I was exactly the same. Or worse, yet, I hadn’t even bothered to make goals for myself because I’d given up.

To be fully transparent, I believe we are here to grow, learn, experiment not toward perfection but living. If I set a bunch of goals I knew on January 1 would be a piece of cake then I’d end the year being less.

How is your inventory going? If you haven’t looked yet, be a little fearless.

Sunshine & Sarcasm,

G