My goal today is to do the laundry, haul one box from the basement and sort it, draft 300 words about the first place I lived on my self-designed respite and post them to my CNF memoir course. And so forth.

My purpose, as I have come to see it in this 66th year, is to make my apartment here back in my hometown where I have been gone 50 years — into he best writer’s retreat ever. Finish my book. Publicize it before it’s done, eat right, sleep right and all that jazz, and play my fiddle to my heart’s content.

It has been a long-freaking-haul, but the purpose question, I have come to believe, is useful mostly to find a compelling reason to proceed into the unknown. It’s only the retrospective of age that has given me the gifted feeling that I have been preparing all my life for this very interesting year.

May your goals and purpose add that feeling, both sooner and later, for you and yours.