The Healthy Management of Reality - Stanford University

Chapter 2Choosing a Direction"If you don't change direction,you'll wind up where you are headed."UnknownChuck Garrigues, a social worker who helped to establish the DepressionClinic at San Francisco General Hospital, liked to emphasize that when we werehelping our patients set goals for their treatment, it was good to also set a directionfor their lives. His point was that, even if specific goals or objectives were notmet, if in the process of moving toward these goals and objectives, the patientmoved his or her life closer to what they considered good, progress had takenplace. And that progress ought to be acknowledged.I tend to agree with this way of framing human life. Although it is importantto pay attention to objective measures in life, it is at least as important to be awareof the general direction toward which one is heading.HMOR.July2005.Muñoz.doc 23