So I've been giving great attention to the meaning of my life and where I'd like to end this journey. Before I can do that though, I had to first recognize what's most important to me. This was no easy task. I had to sort through the years of social conditioning and past experiences. I didn't want my list of values to be biased in any way. I wanted it to have meaning directly related to me as an individual, or should I say directly related to my conscious self. To finalize my list of values, I had to do quite a bit of soul searching.
To begin, I created a rough draft based on how I've been choosing to live in the past. I looked for patterns of strong emotion. I looked for patterns of activities that I am naturally drawn to. This long process came up with about 18 words that I felt I already reflected in some way or another.
At this point, I went through each one and took out any that I felt were empty justifications of being human. In other words, I removed words that were not what I valued, but what I thought I should value. Even in my attempt to figure out who I am, I was still trying to please other people. Basically, those were no good so I shortened the list to 11 words.
With those 11 words, I went through each one again. This time I fast forwarded to my much older self. I closed my eyes and envisioned my life the way I wanted it to be in old age. Then, looking at my list of words, I made sure that each one fit in with that vision. If any of the words felt even slightly off-putting, it had to go. There were 4 off-putting words! Guess what? They had to go.
In my last step, I revised what i had come up with. The remaining 7 words were put in order of importance. I think I read that list at least 100 times just to make sure that the words all felt right. They did and I ended up adding 3 more words. Now that I think about it, those last 3 don't seem all that necessary, but they still feel right. I tried leaving them out, but the list felt incomplete. So now I have a list of 10 values that I feel very strongly about and I'm confident that they will carry me through a long and fulfilling lifetime.
Have you created a list of your own values? If so, what method did you use?
