Miracle of Miracles

It's one thing to set your sights on goals; it's another thing to set your sight on miracles. Get ambitious this holiday season.

The other day, someone challenged me to write down the miracles I hoped to see in my life. What would be the three to five miracles, they asked, that you would wish for right now?

I would wish for our dog, Charlie, to calm, stay, and find her place in our family.

I would wish for good health for my family, however distant some of those solutions currently seem.

I would wish for wisdom in my parenting - that I would know how to show up for my kids in recent challenges.

I often spend time setting goals. These goals end up being slightly ambitious articulations of what I want - targets that are somewhere between ‘mostly attainable’ and ‘reasonably challenging’. But, I noticed something entirely different when I aspired for miracles. Articulating my miracles took me outside my dominant frame of reasonability. It challenged me to set aside the limitations of what I thought was possible and not possible. Suddenly, even that which I couldn’t imagine, which I couldn’t figure out, which I couldn’t see a path towards, became possible. I got to be more ambitious and less reasonable.

The other thing I noticed when orienting around miracles was how immediately I was called to abandon my normative sense of control. If these were miracles, then they likely needed divine intervention - not my feverish beavering away to make something happen. With miracles, I could adopt an orientation of surrender instead of effort.

A bigger ambition without worrying how to make it happen. This was a new - and powerful - version of articulating what I wanted.

In this holiday season, I wish you the audacity to set your sights on miracles - and the fortune of having them come true. 

Meredith

What are the three to five miracles you’re hoping for right now?

How is aspiring to miracles different from aspiring to goals?  What different posture does it invite? 

How might those miracles already, in some capacity, be fulfilled – even as you write them? 


While I’m happy to have gotten a strong re-start in my writing practice - and happy to be reconnected with so many of you - I’m going to moderate the pace of my writing. You’ll continue to see periodic notes, but not on the weekly cadence of the past few weeks. Instead, they’ll pop up with just the right content at just the right time, informed by emergence and serendipity. Until the next!