Introduction
My stroke happened on Pioneer Day 2006, following a brisk one-hour walk around the Provo Temple and a relaxing hour watching Salt Lake City’s Days of ’47 Parade on TV. I sat at my piano to finish writing the last twelve bars of music for a song in The White Star musical which I was co-writing with Doug Stewart and which was to premiere at BYU Education Week in 2007. Within seconds, numbness and weakness spread from my head to most of the right side of my body, and paramedics arrived to transport me to the hospital. It was a difficult time during which I struggled to make peace with my new reality. By the end of the week I could walk only to the nurse’s station and back using a walker and with two therapists steadying me. Doctors were not encouraging about the likelihood of regaining the use of limbs affected by a stroke, feeling it unwise to give false hope. I went home to start discovering my uncertain future.
Four weeks later I tried to keep my commitment to speak at Education Week with my husband Doug.
I stood behind the pulpit holding onto my walker, but when I began to give a talk I had given scores of times before, I felt little “short circuits” in my thinking and had to turn to Doug to fill in certain words or phrases for me. We limped through our classes that week with the encouragement of so many caring, understanding people who kept coming to our classes.
Setting Goals
I had learned a lot about setting and reaching goals during the two decades prior to my stroke and I knew that would be an important part of my recovery. My home therapist, Jim Anderson, helped me set and reach small daily goals that encouraged me. Because I still had feeling in the bottom of my foot and in the ends of my fingers I was eventually able to walk more normally, play the piano, and use my computer. At the end of 2006 I set a goal to finish a 5K race on my own power in 2008. I wrote down the goal and kept it where I could see it, and with the help of a four-wheeled walker I began my regular, albeit altered, walking routine on the sidewalks around the Provo Temple.
Despite discouraging times during the next year I signed up for the “Running with Angels” 5K race at Thanksgiving Point in May of 2008 with the single goal of finishing! I felt I could be anonymous with seven hundred runners involved, but when I arrived, Pamela Hansen (author or Running with Angels) asked me to take the microphone and welcome the runners and then start the race with a rousing, “On your mark . . . get set. . . go!” After all other runners had started I took the first tentative steps toward completing my goal of finishing. It was a beautiful sunny morning at Thanksgiving Point and as I walked uphill, downhill and through the colorful gardens I was inspired by the beauty there. I seemed to gain strength as I walked and found it to be an exhilarating experience just to be out walking on my own—no walker, no cane. My daughter-in-law Kim and my granddaughter Rachel actually ran the race and then doubled back to walk with me to the finish line which added to the fun. Officials checked the device they had attached to my shoestrings and said I had finished in 1:05, which they said was first in my age group (69). I learned there were only three of us in that age group, but nevertheless I had reached my goal, and felt like a winner.
Past Experiences with Goal Setting
Shortly after I made the decision in 1976 to write simple, gospel-themed music I wrote down one specific goal and placed it prominently in my planning book where I would see it often. I considered it a very long-term goal, but saw it there in black and white each time I opened that folder: “I hope that someday Primary children will sing one of my songs.”
Looking back now, over thirty years later, it seems that in some way that I do not fully understand, the very writing down of that simple goal set in motion circumstances and events that brought about the fulfillment of this heartfelt wish. I began receiving assignments to write children’s songs for various occasions or I wrote them for church music contests, or for childrens choirs—songs such as “I Love to See the Temple,” “I’m Trying to Be Like Jesus,” “Army of Helaman,” “Love is Spoken Here,” and “A Child’s Prayer.” At the time I wrote them I did not envision them being used for anything beyond the event for which they were written. But in retrospect I feel that I was being lead to the fulfillment of a worthy, specific, attainable goal that could be of benefit to the Church. When ten of my songs were published in the Children’s Songbook in 1989, I felt humbled, thankful and so blessed.
Years later, in 1995, I was talking with my son Steven about some goals I wanted to set for the future, but was wondering if they might be a bit ambitious—I wanted to be realistic. He shared with me the following thoughts attributed to the philosopher Goethe that gave great clarity to the experience I have just related, and also gave me courage to set more ambitious future goals with a realistic hope of attaining them:
Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence meets you. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would come this way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. (1)
Setting Bolder Goals
During the next couple of decades I wrote music constantly and we recorded new albums once or twice a year. It was a time of setting goals, gaining confidence, having some success, overcoming my fears of public speaking and singing and gaining the confidence to do things I never imagined I would do. I will mention two of them:
For years I had listened in the studio as the best vocalists in Mormondom added their amazing talents to our orchestrated music. I often thought how scary it would be to be the vocalist recording something as perfectly as possible, knowing it would be permanent! I was happy to know I would never be on the other side of the window in the studio.
But one day an outrageous thought occurred to me: Someday I want to record an album with ME singing with that orchestra—just to experience it.
The thought was so strong that I wrote it down on a secret little list I was starting of “things I want to do before I die” (referred to these days as a “bucket list”).
Almost immediately I started recalling how often people had said to me after our firesides (mostly women my age!): “You should record your songs with you singing them—we hear you on your programs and that is who we want to hear on the recordings.” I dared to start trying to make this goal a reality, chose songs that I felt I could sing fairly well, and set a date to record. Receiving assurances from the sound engineer that he could auto-tune my pitch and perform other magic to enhance my performance I bravely recorded the album, A Song of the Heart. My friends like it, and my posterity might enjoy hearing their Grandma sing somewhere down the line. And I checked it off my bucket list!
I wrote one new song especially for this album. It is mostly a whimsical song but I hope it also has some wisdom in it that will inspire me, and maybe others, to reach for goals that seem beyond reach.
Livin’ My Dream
Do you have a dream, a wish deep inside you—
An outrageous scheme—then until you have tried
You will never quite know just how far you can go
In livin’ your dream.
I had a dream, I think it’s worth saying,
I wanted to sing with an orchestra playing!
A very bold choice for my average voice,
But this was my dream.
Chorus:
So I hired some strings and some woodwinds and things
And a few shiny brass, just to give it some class.
I decided to hire a fine back-up choir—
Paid them all that I could to make me sound good!
Then I wrote down a song,
Something simple but strong,
Hired someone to lead who could help me succeed,
And I’m livin’ my dream.
If you have a dream, don’t hide or deny it
Just bravely decide to stand up and try it!
You may be surprised, after twenty-five tries
You’ll be livin’ your dream.
I used to just dream, but now I am older.
I risk a few things, I feel a bit bolder.
If I want to try something pie-in-the-sky,
I’ll follow that dream.
( Repeat chorus)
And someday, don’t laugh, I may even aspire
To sing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir!
This was my dream, just one of those things
I knew I must try, though I couldn’t say why.
So I gave it my best, now I’ll have no regrets—
I’m livin’ my dream.
(JKP , 1999)
Another comment I often heard after our programs was, “Have you ever written down the stories you tell about how your songs came to be written, and experiences you have had since you wrote them? We would like to have them in a collection—a book.” I had heard it so often that it finally got my attention and I realized that it might be an important thing to do if only for the sake of history. But the thought of writing a book was overwhelming and I kept putting it off.
One night while pondering in my studio I realized that if I ever were to do this I would have to break the task down into doable parts and set specific, attainable goals or it would never happen. I looked through all of my songs and chose one hundred of them that had interesting stories about them. I set a goal to write these stories in one year’s time. That would require that I write two stories a week for one year—a reasonable goal. The stories were rather short and I put a big “X” on my calendar each week as I finished two of them. During the two extra weeks I wrote a few introductory chapters to set the stage for the stories and lyrics that were printed with each one. At the end of the year when my book was completed right on schedule, and even accepted by a publisher, I felt a great sense of accomplishment, and a renewed testimony of the power of setting goals. The Stories Behind the Songs represents a happy milestone for me in setting and achieving goals I didn’t think were possible.
Elder M. Russell Ballard has strongly stated,
I am so thoroughly convinced that if we don’t set goals in our life and learn how to master the technique of living to reach our goals, we can reach a ripe old age and look back on our life only to see that we reached but a small part of our full potential. When you learn to master the principle of setting a goal, you will then be able to make a great difference in the results you attain in this life…If you want to have success in the goal-setting process, you learn to write your goals down. I would even put them in a prominent place…Spend your energies doing those things that will make a difference. (2)
Be Courageous in Goal Setting
These words of JoAnn Larsen, writer for the Deseret News in Salt Lake City, have inspired me for over a decade:
Few persons set out deliberately to miss the wonder and richness of living, but it is treacherously easy to do it. A postponement here, a side stepping there, a hesitant retreat—and a life may diminish behind a wall of negatives: No, I can’t; I won’t; it can never happen—and the rhetoric goes on in people’s minds, cheating them of opportunities to grow and to find joy…
Life is a journey—a process of singing our songs—of finding out who we are and what we may become. We’re all born to unspecified possibilities, and the more we risk, the more we discover about ourselves…
Watch for the right time and season, show gratitude for your gifts by magnifying and using them with pure intentions with an eye single to the glory of God and He will bless your efforts. (3)
As Elder Carlos Asay recently said, “Goals lend purpose and direction to our living. They excite the imagination and stir interest, and they generate a strength of anticipation which can rally all the powers of one’s soul . . . . The person who sets goals and strives to attain such is the master of his own fate.” (4)
And I might add, you’ll have a lot of fun along the way!
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Janice Kapp Perry: Composer, author, lecturer.
He Brought Me Light is Janice’s lastest collection of songs, just released (Nov 2010).
- Often attributed to Goethe, but for clarification see https://www.goethesociety.org/pages/quotescom.html
- Ballard, M. Russell, New Era, March 2004.
- Larsen, JoAnn, Deseret News, date unknown.
- Asay, Carlos E., New Era, September, 2010.
