Want to improve your 2020 vision?
Where are you aiming? Psychologist Jordan Peterson points out you’re not going to hit what you don’t aim at. The new year — and new decade — present the optimal moment to recalibrate. Jordan Peterson’s Self-Authoring Suite, a journaling program that has been experimentally researched, is the best tool at hand to get the job done.
Why, at a moment of looking forward, might you want to look back? In my opinion, Jungian therapist James Hillman makes the most compelling case of all. In The Force of Character and the Lasting Life, Hillman suggests that the biological processes that characterize aging — namely, the afflictions — play an important role in character formation. He claims, “the dysfunctions of aging convert to functions of character;” that “character learns wisdom from the body.”
Of interest here: his comments about memory loss. With age, short-term memory fades while long-term memory, a function of the reflecting brain, becomes more vivid. At middle age, we start to notice a steady stream of formerly long forgotten memories that intrude on consciousness.
Why?
Hillman ventures a guess:
We all have to chew and swallow the errors and misfortunes, sprinkled well with the salt of remorse, of what had previously been two-dimensional memoranda, flat like pages from a calendar, simply things that happened without pattern, without meaning. Life review yields long-term gains that enrich character by bringing understanding to events. The patterns in your life become more discernible among the wreckage and the romance, more like a well-plotted novel that reveals characters through their actions and reactions. Life review is really nothing other than rewriting — or writing for the first time — the story of your life, or writing your life into stories. And without stories there is no pattern, no understanding, no art, and no character — merely habits, events passing before the eyes of an aimless observer, a life unreviewed, a life lost in the living of it (p. 132).
Peterson’s journaling software, providing a lens for processing past events (while also envisioning future agendas and goals), replicates the process that biology itself seems to engender. And why not start the process voluntarily now versus succumbing to it later?
Can Peterson’s software help tweak your 2020 vision? I’ll venture to say ‘yes’. Research has shown a range of significant benefits that have accrued to those who’ve undertaken the project, benefits not accrued by those in the control group. Speaking of control, why not take control of your vision for 2020 and start writing. And to do that, you can let Peterson give you a helping hand.
Affiliate link provides bibliographic reference information.
