Note: the site was down until the 3rd so here’s a slightly belated but still stylish New Year’s Post!
**
Okay, I’ve done it. I’ve made my New Year’s Resolutions list for 2012. I know some are naysayers about the whole resolution exercise. One friend—via Twitter—explained she’d changed her diet and exercise in the beginning of December because she was ready to. Waiting made no sense to her. Darn straight: jump (onto the elliptical) while the iron is hot so to speak.
**
Fast aside: this Twitter friend, who’s a lovely writer, is committed to the health of people around her, including in her Twitter orbit, and so she nags folks to do things like take vitamins and go the doctor. These are common sense things, yes? Sometimes, we avoid such practicalities. I’ll admit at first I kind of wrote her pleas and nags off. Or maybe, avoided her reminders because I’d so dug my head in sand in regards to the mammogram appointment I’d let slide.
So, finally, I emailed my fantastic midwife and asked her to nag me. She looked on my chart and emailed back: mammogram is long overdue. I called, got one (thankfully, all clear). I told one of my best pals about my process and she made appointments for the gynecologist and the general practitioner.
This is a longwinded way to say 1) reminders sometimes simply help us do what we mean to do and 2) it takes a village to get a mammogram (at least, sometimes).
**
Some people experience New Year’s resolutions as another way to beat up on themselves, arguing they are an excuse to focus upon what’s not good enough. At yoga this week, the teacher spoke of a concept that is less shedding the old than carrying everything forth into the next—and honoring all of it, the easy and the harder. There was a lot of twisting in the class, which felt (physically) great. I didn’t exactly groove on the metaphor of the twist so much during class. I do believe life requires us to learn how to carry whatever it is we have to carry with us, though.
(Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Resolutions, 1942)
For me, New Year’s isn’t a time to shame myself or make drastic changes or anything so decidedly linear. It’s more like an enforced little pause during the year’s darkest hour to mull how I might step back toward the lighter times ahead. I’m not exactly sure why, but I have always loved the act of making this particular list. I’ve done it with friends and in journals and on postcards and on calendars. I’ve written New Year’s resolutions by hand and on my computer. Sometimes, I’ve had lists that are really concrete; other times, more esoteric or lofty or vague. I guess that’s been mood dependent or catered to the year or happenstance. Flossing regularly made the list for about ten years running. I floss practically every day, now.
This year, my list is an odd amalgamation of practical minutiae and larger wishes. Jotting them down here, with a few annotations in parentheses….
- Reach for my oxygen mask first more often (put another way—be more selfish)
- Sleep more—and continue to prioritize trying to get my kids sleeping more and my teens moving more (Y membership has been procured)
- Be easier on myself
- Pitch stories every week
- Don’t be afraid to ask to be paid for work
- Trust my writing—and my process—more
- Persist with six for five, all for one and other adventures in seeking a more organized house and more cooperative family engagement (Six people, five minutes makes a good bit more daily clean up in the house)
- Print photographs more often (having switched from film to digital within the last two years, I haven’t made printing photos enough of a habit)
- Read more books
- Can tomatoes (I have a pressure canner now!)
- Practice being consistent, calm and kind
- Find more ways to connect with my beloved husband (time is such a precious resource and there’s not so much more of that—but perhaps we can find new ways to sneak each other in)
- Hold out hope by digging into gratitude and affirming the positive (this works better for me than despair) And still—think critically
- Keep imagining better for the world (especially in this important election year)
- Cultivate patience
**
Another way I am going to use this enforced pause, the tiny moment of quiet stolen as the calendar year turns its page is to tell you Shadows’ readers that your contributions—reading, sharing, commenting, emailing, running into me and saying something about the blog—mean so much to me. If I sound a little mushy on the subject, so be it: I am truly grateful—and I thank you.
