New Year
It’s the first of the year, and it feels like everyone is writing the obligatory resolution post about how this year will be different from the last; how we’ll finally become our best self.
But I’m not feeling it.
I am facing 2017 with a lot of trepidation. Did you ever go to River Country as a kid? There was a platform in the man-made lake with a wooden post and a swinging arm. The person hung from the arm and swung out over the water before they dropped down. When it was my turn, I was hanging from the arm, and I looked down into the water. I saw a flash of an orange fish beneath the surface, and I couldn’t make my body drop. I was suddenly aware that there were fish in the water; and if there were fish, then there were probably snakes and turtles and all sort of other things below the murky surface. The other kids were screaming at me to drop off the arm because they wanted their turn, and I finally released myself so I could quickly swim out of the water. I remember spending the rest of the day going down a water slide with a tube so I could be in the water without really being “in” the water.
The point: 2017 makes me feel like I’m staring down into murky water, and I’m wondering what is below the surface. This is not where I thought we’d be when we started 2016.
This is a downer of a New Years post.
These are my goals for the year: Before December 2017, I want to be the world’s best backgammon player (why aim small?), return to fiction and complete a new novel, and get into grant writing (by which I mean proposal writing, since… you know… you write proposals for grants). All do-able with the possible exception of world’s best backgammon player. I may need to settle for “able to always beat the computer on the expert setting.” What are your goals?
10 comments
Um, my goal this year will be to keep two infants alive at the same time, and to adjust to my new role as Mom. So strange to have put so much of my energy in the past decade into my career and the quest to become a mother and to be walking away from both in 2017. (I will be on maternity leave until the 2018-2019 school year.) It’s also strange to have such starkly different feelings about my private life and the wider world, where a President Trump will take office and I have never felt less secure in the stability of our democracy. For sure, it will be a memorable year. Here goes nothing!
Something about having the New Year and my birthday back-to-back always gives me anxiety about the year to come. Usually the anxiety is for my family personally but this year, the rest of the country (world?) is on my mind too.
My goals for this year are to read 50 books, run my second half-marathon, blah blah blah 😉
I woke up this morning with vague anxiety too. But my goal will continue to be the same as the one I started a month or so ago – get back to being me, get back to being healthy. I injured my knee a while ago which necessitated me to stop running. Initially I replaced running with yoga but somehow that fizzled out. As a result, I stopped drinking enough water and for unrelated reasons drank more alcohol – nothing excessive, but more than typical – which made me feel generally yucky and led to more caffeine, which then became a habit. Add this to my general feeling of unease that my first born started kindergarten and I don’t know who I am any more. But I’m on my way – I’ve accepted that I can’t run right now but I can walk fast and that makes me feel good. I prefer to drink tea at night so I need to reach for that instead of something else. I need to let go of perfection and accept that little changes are all I really need. So that’s my goal – continue back to being healthy and find myself again.
Goals:
1) Survive transition into new career path.
2) connect with science ed group to write grants (I have some grant writing connections, so feel free to drop me a line).
3) Start up with weekly yoga.
Ugh. I’m not much of a NY goal/resolution person. And this year–ugh. As bad as 2016 was, at least it wasn’t 2017 yet. Now we’re that much closer to a T presidency. It’s more real.
I do need to get back to going to bed earlier though. And there will be a few big events taking place in my work life, I hope to prevail.
In August we’ll be back to one drop off/pickup since my baby will start TK. So that’s good. But then I have to face the whole camp situation for when the school is closed. No more safety of the daycare/preschool we’ve been at for 3+ years.
None really, other than AJ’s fortune cookie from the other day: “be prepared to change your plan.” I feek like I have to live in each year for a while, to get a sense of it, then maybe I can come up with goals. Too much pressure to do that now.
I am not a resolution maker-I resent the notion that because the calendar changes to a new year, one must make all kinds of (unattainable) goals.
That being said…I am using the new year as a new start, one that I very much need. I have been feeling very emotionally unstable lately and lacking a sense of myself. I have gained a lot of weight in the past 6 months, due in part to a medication I was taking, and also I wasn’t making time at all for myself/taking care of myself. Clothes aren’t fitting, I feel just generally fat and unattractive. I’m struggling. I’m working today, so starting tomorrow I am going to make some changes and hopefully get back to feeling good again. Hoping to find some support, somewhere along the way.
I think our goals are similar – get back to being ourselves. I’m feeling optimistic! We can do this!
A simple goal. End this year happier and more satisfied with myself than I started it. It shouldn’t be too hard.
I’m writing a whole post on my new year’s goals, for Monday. But the short version is: put gentleness in to the world.