There’s something about the coming of another new year that makes me want to create a resolution in the same way it makes other people want to opt out of participating. Tying goal-setting to an arbitrary date on the calendar may feel just that, like another push in the endless striving for us to be productive or needlessly trying harder to achieve some hypothetical better version of ourselves. Coming on the heels of the holidays it’s all laced with a particular flavor of consumerism, in case your holiday hangover wasn’t already painful enough. Buy more, do more, be more – often without considering what truly makes us happy and what we truly need.
I don’t buy into this – no pun intended – and yet I actually find that New Year’s resolutions work well for me. Or call it being intentional, if nothing else. At least for me, the clean slate of a new calendar year has been powerful. So powerful that the intentions I set for January 1 often carry me far beyond the winter doldrums when others may have abandoned their clean new notebooks and lofty plans. Like when I started losing weight on January 1, 2021 and continued for over 50 weeks to hit a 100-lb loss. Could I have done that at some other point during the year? I don’t know. I hope so. But don’t ask me. I’m so busy making the perfect the enemy of the good at times I’m afraid not. All I know is I needed to be good and exhausted with the status quo and that generally happens at the end of the year.
And 2023 certainly has been no exception. I am tired on many levels, and in my bones. And yet I’m looking forward to seeing what I can accomplish in 2024. I feel a massive renewal coming and it excites me. I feel beaten down but I know I’m not out, not by a long shot.
I’m not ready to give a year in review for 2023, or preview what’s in store for 2024 just yet. It has been a particularly difficult last few months for me, caring for my stepmother as she died of pancreatic cancer with my dad and I at her side. I have just returned from her funeral and am still processing all that happened. It still doesn’t seem real.
There is illness and difficulty otherwise in my family that concerns me greatly. I’m in the last 25% slide towards the end of my fourth tour and beginning to mentally prepare for what will be expected of me to go overseas again, and how our lives will change when we do. It has been wonderful to be on a domestic tour during this period of time, but I know it won’t last forever.
If the blog owes you an email, I do promise I will get to it. I have been paying a lot of attention to others lately, and very little attention to myself, and so I need to do some major recalibrating now that these holidays are over. If I were my iPhone, I would be blinking a low battery warning and on the verge of a hard shutdown. When will I ever learn to balance this life better? <Sigh.>
Happy New Year to everyone who reads the blog, and I hope everything you wish for and hope to create in 2024 is lining up to come your way! All the best of health, happiness, and prosperity to you and yours.
Collecting Postcards 
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