Mission statement

When Craig and I were planning our wedding back in 2000, we wrote a mission statement. It's easy to lose perspective when you're planning a wedding, and suddenly you find yourself wasting time and money on things you don't even care about -- worse, the things that are important to you may get lost in the shuffle. There were so many choices that we felt like we needed a constant written reminder of what was most important to us.

It was more like a list of goals than a mission statement:

• family-oriented, hospitable, fun, comfortable, relaxed
  
• meaningful, loving, but not too sentimental
• dignified, not embarrassing
• beautiful, understated, simple elegance
• not lavish, ornate, or excessive
• organized, but not rigid or polished
• some ritual structure, but not a big theater production

We interviewed one pushy photographer who seemed quite proud of himself for asking all "his brides" to come up with a list of words describing their ideal wedding. When we told him we already had, he looked a little deflated. He read our list (naturally we had it with us) and said, "There's one word I don't see here ... romantic!" In fact, he gave us a fill-in-the-blanks mission statement worksheet that had "romantic" pre-printed as item number one. We didn't hire him.

If a mission statement can provide guidance for something as concrete as a wedding, how about for something as abstract as parenting and family life? I've been reading Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, and there's a chapter entitled Family Values:

Our individual and collective values speak volumes through how we conduct ourselves in the ordinary, everyday unfolding of our lives. We embody our priorities, whether we like it or not, and whether we know it or not ... We might ask ourselves, "What is most important to us? What do we value most as parents? Are there basic principles we can point to that are priorities for our family, that we actually put first in our choices and in our actions?"

So we need to define our family's values -- whether or not we have a written mission statement -- before we can begin to determine whether we're acting according to those values on a daily basis. This seems so important to me, as does mindfulness in general. I am prone to daydreams both good and bad, so I often see life through my own filters rather than being consciously aware of what is really happening.

I've got to practice mindfulness more before I can really write about it. But for several weeks now when I've tried to be fully present in the moment, tried to be mindful, I've often ended up thinking about blogging about mindfulness. Maybe that will stop now that I've actually done it.