What are goals?

A shift towards wholeness

Take a breath.

Feel your body…its weight, its rhythm. Notice your hands, how they feel as they touch the device that is showing you these words. Notice the subtle sounds they make as the device moves, or the heat you feel where the device meets your skin.

This is the field of your own experience.

You are within this field. You always have been.

And yet, most of us were taught to look somewhere else. We learn to set goals that move us out of this moment and into some imagined better one. We’ve learned to treat ourselves as objects to be improved, moved forward, optimized.

But what if our goals were not projects of self-advancement? What if they were moments of coherence?

I am writing to you about a shift… a subtle, radical reorientation. It’s about how we come to want what we want, and what happens when we begin to live from a different perspective.

Perspective A and Perspective B

About twenty years ago, I wrote an essay for myself called Shift. It explored two different perspectives of reality. I revisit this essay from time to time, to help bring myself back home to what I call Perspective B. I came back to it again recently while working on GoalPost, and I see now how clearly it aligns with what we’re creating.

Let’s begin there.

Perspective A is the one most of us are used to. It says:

• I am a person.

• I have a body, a history, a name.

• I make choices, set goals, and try to become better.

• The world is outside of me, and I am navigating through it.

Perspective B is subtler. It doesn’t reject A, but it arises from a different realization:

• All that I know is my experience.

• Every sensation, thought, sound, or image I’ve ever known has come through experience.

• Even my sense of self, the "I" who thinks, is part of that experience.

• Therefore, the only thing I can be sure of is that experience is happening.

From Perspective B, identity is not a fixed thing. It’s an ongoing, emergent property, like a pattern that keeps arising in water. The more we relax into this awareness, the more we find ourselves living from the source of experience, rather than from the story of the one experiencing it.

Goals From the Center of the Field

If identity itself is emergent, then what are goals?

Most of us learn to set goals from within Perspective A. We imagine ourselves as fixed entities moving forward through time. Goals are our way of navigating, like coordinates on a map.

But from Perspective B, something shifts.

A goal is no longer a project to control the future. It’s a signal of coherence. It’s something that arises naturally when we are in contact with the source of our own awareness.

It’s less about striving, and more about listening.

It’s less about achievement, and more about resonance.

From this place, goals emerge the way a plant reaches toward the sun, not because it decided to, but because it is in relation to the light.

The Natural Order of Life and Wholeness

During his long career as an architect, Christopher Alexander wrote about and practiced a way of working that strove towards what he first called "the quality without a name," then later he did name this quality: as "wholeness," "life," and "beauty."

He discovered that to generate this quality in the built environment, it required a different way of being in the world, and a different way of relating. He taught others to do the same.

I believe this applies to how we live, how we relate to our own arising desires, and how we move toward them

When our attention, sensation, memory, and longing are working together, not in perfect harmony, but in natural coherence, something beautiful arises.

Goals that arise from this place don’t need to be forced. They carry their own momentum. They feel alive.

This is what we are building with GoalPost: a field where such goals can be named, sensed, and supported. They aren’t tasks to complete, but frequencies to return to.

A Different Kind of Technology

GoalPost is an ecology. A relational field. A quiet invitation to return to the source of your own experience and let what arises from there be honored.

It’s also a digital system, yes. But it’s one designed to listen rather than to optimize or extract.

When you offer a longing into GoalPost, it ripples outward to find resonance. Others may feel that same hum, that same frequency. The field reflects back to you patterns. Invitations. Subtle coherence.

Over time, this changes how we know what we want.

It helps us remember how to want from the center of the field, our own source of awareness.

It teaches us that goals are echoes of becoming.

And we can follow them like songs.

If this stirred something in you, I’d love to hear what’s resonating. Or, feel free to wander a little further into the field, and read my thoughts on the word "GoalPost."

~ Jennifer