I’ve often heard the adage that how you spend the first day of the year is how you will spend ALL of it, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true. However, if it is, I will be sleeping, eating, reading, listening to music, doing laundry, having computer issues and relaxing. Which, apart from working and my social life, is basically a thorough summary of how I spent LAST year so maybe the adage is backwards!
I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions…I find, like most people, that the motivation disappears quickly, and so I try to set some manageable goals instead. Some of them are only in my head, where I can keep them to myself, because really I consider most such resolutions to be extremely personal and no one else’s business. But some goals are things that need to be put out there, where I can not only see them, but also have them acknowledged and reaffirmed by others.
Some of my manageable goals were written in my last post, the last post of 2011, which makes them seem to be part of the last year and because I want to be sure to note them again for myself for THIS year, I’m repeating them here:
- WALK WALK WALK
- Midsummer with my entire first family in northern Germany!
- Possible family vacation to Greece
- Thorough clutter cleaning in the whole house
That first one seems to show up in my goals/resolutions list every year…I don’t know why I can’t make a habit of it.
In addition, I have some other goals for 2012:
- Rejuvenate my creative side
- Consider happiness as a given
- Discourage negativity in myself and others
I recently read an interesting and thought-provoking book, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, and while I don’t have the time or inclination to start such a thorough project on the same kind of scale, it did give me a lot of things to think about. I intend to explore and adopt some of her ideas in my own life and see how much I can stretch.
Some people pick a word for the year and try to apply it in all aspects of their life. I find that a little limiting in some ways…it’s the same feeling I get when someone (usually my daughter, who is preoccupied with favorites right now) asks me what my favorite (insert category) is. I find it extremely difficult to give a single, definitive answer to those types of questions. How can I narrow it down when I have so MANY? I can’t even handle those “what 10 books would you want with you on a desert island” type games, much less having to choose only ONE.
She asked me the other day what my favorite song was, and I couldn’t give her an answer. Finally, frustrated, she said, “Okay, well how about just ONE of your favorites?!” and when I finally extracted a song to tell her (Build Me Up Buttercup), her response was a withering teenage, “Seriously??” *grin*
But I guess if I had to pick a word for 2012, I would pick “stretch” since that seems to be applicable to many areas of my life: personal, home, work, social, creative, spiritual, etc. It’s the first day of a new year, and the first day of the rest of my life and a good stretch is how I started it (late late LATE in the morning), so I’ll go with that and see where it gets me.