Feb 9
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This chasm between what I think I am and what I really am has never been more difficult to cross than now. Unemployed me couldn’t possibly be a treasured piece? What am I without to-do lists and deadlines and an organizational email address?
I am enough.
– Jamie Golden
The Post About Being A Work Of Art
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Feb 3
I’ve added Thankfulness to my goals list (again) this year.
I was seeing the world in a more positive light after I started being Thankful in 2011. It was awesome, I loved it.
But by 2012 I thought I had it down pat. So I switched from recording my thankfuls every day to writing a weekly thankful. I thought I was ready to do less. I even wrote a huge recap post about my thankfulness journey, ending with how it was time to move on to the next step. Basically meaning it was just too much of a hassle to keep track of a daily thankful list any more. You know, because I’ve got so many other things to do that I really needed that five or ten minutes of my life back each day.
Did you know that if you don’t keep practicing something you’ve just learned to do, then you’ll slowly forget everything you thought you’d already mastered? Well, you will.
Cue another post about how I needed to get back in a thankful frame of mind. I decided I would go back to writing daily thankfuls in September of 2012. Then I promptly stopped doing any thankfuls at all. *sigh*
I really miss them though. I miss feeling thankful and being reminded every day of all the good I have in my life. I miss immediately seeing the positive in every situation, and that’s how far I had gotten before I let it all slide away.
So I’m trying again! If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again! Right? So I’ve started my Thankful in 2014 page and I’m going to do my best to keep it updated. I’ve pretty much got to start all over from scratch and get myself in the habit again of finding great things in my day. And as Puddleglum said, you’ve got to start by looking!
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Do you have anything in your life that you have to keep learning over and over and over again?
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Jan 13
Okay, so I’m doing resolutions again this year. A little late, haha, but that’s me all over. I did okay with my goals in 2012 – not as well as I’d like, but my failures were in those giant goals I set for myself that would require a radical overhaul of my 43-year-strong habits. Cause, you know, that’s not too much to ask of myself, right?
I spent a lot of last year beating myself up for those failures, and the rest of the time learning how to suck at something without hating myself for it. (If anything, I’d say that’s the real lesson I learned.) At the end of the year, I wrote a big long post about what I thought I’d learned. Basically, that for those major life change, long term goals, I really needed to plan out steps and smaller goals along the way. Which is not a wrong idea, in and of itself. You know, if I knew how to do small steps like a normal person with good sense and a modicum of patience.
So, naturally, at the beginning of 2013 I did the typical Michelle thing: I made the work of goal achieving harder and bigger than it already is. I mapped and planned and plotted and charted and listed. Same old thing; biting off more than I can chew and overwhelming myself before I even really get started. All my charty listy mappy plans were just too cumbersome and added more work to already difficult (for me) goals. My checklists fell by the wayside almost immediately, and I struggled all last year to get my act together goal-wise, not getting any further ahead than I had been at the beginning.
I did accomplish a lot in 2013, I really did. But I missed the simple resolution process that I’d started in 2012. I wanted to do many of those same goals again in 2013, but without the reminder and prod here on the blog, I let a lot of the smaller things, like visiting family and taking an outing each month, fall by the wayside. I missed doing those things, but they don’t come to me naturally. Without my resolution list, I simply forgot to aim or plan for them.
This year I’m going back to the 2012 method of setting and tracking my goals here. Some of those not-so-simple goals are back, but I’m working with a life coach to help me learn to set reasonable steps, or goals-within-a-goal. But I think the main thing she’s going to help me with is to slow down and not bite off such big chunks. Patience. And to enjoy this whole process, because it should be fun and inspirational and a kind thing I’m doing for myself.
So here are my 2014 goals:
So that’s it, my 2014 resolutions. I’m excited to get started, or re-started, as the case may be! I hope 2014 is a great year for me and for you, too!!
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Jan 12
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People do not despise you for your failures. … People despise you for not being transparent about your failure.
– Larry Carter
from:
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I'm a writer and photographer, sometime poet and philosopher, who is figuring out who she was meant to be.
Me Robo El Show (Instrumental Jazz Mix) by Jeris is licensed under a Attribution Noncommercial (3.0).
steadily skipping stones 