Before making this post, I searched my archives to find out if I’d ever said anything about the fact that I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Apparently not. I don’t, in fact, make New Year’s resolutions. Maybe I read too many books as a child, but they have always seemed to me to be something that you try to do (every day, N times per week, whatever), but fail, and usually because you miss one day and then you’ve BROKEN your RESOLUTION OH NOES!!! And you have to be sad and give up and feel useless. Which is silly. You aren’t going to magically turn into a different person in the day between December 31 and January 1, but you might turn into a different one between January 1 and December 31, if you try.

So I do make goals for the year, which I think is what most people do in real life anyway. I have some ambitious goals this year, so I decided that in addition to just having the goals, I would make an effort to every day do something, however small, that would either advance my goals or be pleasant and restorative for me. The everyday intention is neither hard enough to be prohibitive, nor easy enough to be trivial.

Granted, we are only five days into the New Year, but what has come out of this so far is not just progress on my goals, but a view of my days as containers to hold positive efforts and experiences, rather than as trials to get through. I was really stressed and not in a very good place for the last month or so of 2009, and had been having trouble viewing life positively, even though I recognized in my mind that aside from certain stressors, things were going well. A vacation was called for, and I was lucky to have a restorative time with my family back in New Mexico, which allowed me to get out of the rut I was in and get my perspective turned around for the better for the new year.