New Year, Same Me

Is there anything more promising than New Year’s Day?  Untouched and filled with hope, we are all so optimistic about the future.  Our lives are a clean slate just waiting for the story of the year to be written.  Of course, in reality most of us wake up hung over and can hardly fathom accomplishing half of the resolutions we promised we would keep once the ball dropped at midnight.

My husband and I rarely drink, so the hang over was not an issue this morning, and I can tell you wholeheartedly I do not miss it.  I’m far too old to handle the all-day nausea and the skull-piercing headache that accompanies a night of drinking.  That’s neither here nor there for this post, I suppose.  This is a note about my aspirations for the year, promises I’m making to myself.  I say this not only so I can hold myself accountable, but also so I can check in every so often and see how the progress is going

First and most obviously, I want to continue to find low-waste routines to help us downsize the amount of garbage we produce.  It’s a constant learning process, finding new practices to incorporate into our ever-growing, consistently evolving regime.

We did not escape the pandemic Instagram fad of baking bread and making photogenic frozen coffee, and it got me thinking.  I have a ton of cookbooks that I hardly ever touch.  They sit on the shelves in my kitchen looking lovely.  Another goal I have is to, at least once a month, pull a book, pick a recipe at random, and make something new.  That will also defeat the menu boredom we’ve been suffering from.  We basically roll through the same five or six different dinners every week:  spaghetti, tacos, baked chicken, meatloaf, jambalaya.  So I’m super excited about making this dream a reality.

Another thing I started doing more while I was out of work last year was making things by hand.  When I was a little girl, my grandma taught me how to sew and crochet.  I can’t even begin to tell you how many scarves I have sitting in my sewing basket next to the couch, and you couldn’t even guess how much yarn I have stockpiled in the hall closet.  I want to up my crochet game and make something a little more challenging.  I started a blanket for my son a while back, so maybe my first intention will be to finish that.

I want to start practicing yoga.  Every single time I do even the shortest yoga exercise, I feel like a million bucks.  Why don’t I take the time to do it if it makes me feel like the sun shines out of my behind?  It baffles me.  I have strengthened my meditation practice in the past nine months or so, and I want to continue to nurture that habit.  (I am kind of grouping these two together because I feel that they can be intertwined. ) As an added challenge, I’ve joined a meditation group on Insight Timer that has a morning session for each day in January.  We’ll see if I can stick with it.   

Finally, I want to write more.  I keep a journal and I kept up on it every single day of last year.  It was important for me because I was pregnant and I wanted to document each wild event in the ever-changing world that was 2020.  So I will continue to journal, but I also want to make sure I drop at least two posts a month here, too.

So what are your resolutions this year?  Of course we all want 2021 to be better than 2020.  I believe we have set the bar so low that that should really be a nonissue.  Having said that though, most of my resolutions for the upcoming year were borne out of practices I picked up throughout the course of the last 12 months. 

Nothing has to change overnight.  I think people set unrealistic goals for themselves and say things like, “I’m going to work out every day.”  Instead of saying you’ll do it every day, maybe try, “I’ll do it once a week.”  Or even set parameters, like doing something for five or seven days.  In the end, even if we miss a day or forget to do something it doesn’t make us failures.  Each day can be like New Year’s Day, a fresh start, a new beginning.   I hope whoever reads this feels good about the accomplishments that they achieve, no matter how small.  Happy New Year!  

2020: The Bad, The Worse, and The Greatest Year Ever

It’s unbelievable that tonight is New Year’s Eve.  Wasn’t it just January last month?  This year felt devastatingly long and yet supernaturally quick.  It was certainly the most interesting time of my life, and I’m sure most people who didn’t live through the Depression would say the same.  Looking back now, I have such a mixed bag of emotions.  The juxtaposition of being gut-wrenchingly miserable and to experience the single greatest moment of my life all in the past 12 months is quite the enigma.

2020 was financially devastating and emotionally taxing.  Tensions ran high, morale was low, and hope was on the verge of becoming extinct.  Businesses closed.  People lost loved ones; we lost people close to us.  Not a single one of us got through this year without experiencing some form of hardship, heartache, or grief.  Everyone’s plans got canceled.  All of our itineraries were erased. 

Once summer came around, and most of us accepted and acclimated to our new normal, things started to get better.  It wasn’t doom and gloom 24/7.  Slowly, the world began to open up again and there was light at the end of the proverbial tunnel.  The plans we had made this year were rescheduled for next year, and that made us feel optimistic.  2020 taught us to be flexible, to be patient.

The things I was most looking forward to that didn’t happen include: a trip to NYC with my best friend to see Moulin Rouge on Broadway, a They Might Be Giants concert for the 30th anniversary of Flood, and my beloved Woollybear Festival in Vermilion, Ohio (look it up; it’s quite possibly the most Ohio thing to ever exist).

Reviewing these past 52 weeks, I definitely see more good than bad.  Before everything shut down, we were able to take a trip to California to visit my uncles in Palm Springs.  We went whale watching in San Diego.  In March, literally the last day before everything closed, my mom and best friend and I were able to attend the very last showing of Jesus Christ Superstar at the Playhouse, and I’ll never not be grateful for that special memory we now all share. 

Being out of work gave me time to focus on things that helped me immensely both mentally and physically.  I was able to devote some time each morning to my meditation practice, something I’ve been promising myself I would do for years.  I was able to work out almost every day because we are fortunate enough to have a home gym in our basement.  My husband and I watched 256 movies.  I read 53 books, double the number of what I set my goal to be for the year, and more than I’ve ever read in that amount of time.  I got to spend Thanksgiving with my dad.  We haven’t spent the holidays together in 17 years, so that was a huge deal. 

Obviously, and most importantly, the event that makes 2020 the greatest year ever also happens to be the single most magnificent, impressive thing I have ever done in my life:  giving birth to my son.  It was the wildest time to be pregnant, but aside from having to fly solo to prenatal appointments, constant COVID testing, and a crippling fear that I would have to deliver without my husband by my side, everything did work out.  I plan on writing about my experiences and what it was like to be pregnant during a global pandemic soon.

So was this year arduous?  Undoubtedly.  Was it a struggle almost the entire 12 months?  I would have to say yes.  It will live on in infamy in our memories, making us shudder at the recollections it elicits.  But again, the amount of good that grew out of this year for me really overshadows the bad, and in 2020 that’s almost unheard of.  This year has made me focus on what is important, appreciate the things that surround me, and know that every day the sun will come up and life will go on indefinitely.

Collectively we kept saying, “If we can make it to the end of the year, everything will be okay.”  Well, here we are, watching the clock tick towards midnight to close out the first year of the ‘20s, and I couldn’t feel more hopeful about the future.  I choose to have faith that things will keep getting better.  I believe the darkness is receding.  I wish that whoever reads this remains positive and I pray that 2021 is the marvelous year we all so desperately deserve.  Happy New Year!!