January 13, 2013
New Year, new post – the ‘where to go from here’ edition
There is something about a new year. A clean slate. A slash-and-start-anew kind of feeling.
We make promises to ourselves and others. This year will be different! This year I will do all my XYZ on my list and I will be victorious!
For myself, I peter out around February. heh. Good intentions and all that.
Still, there are changes that need to come. I need to exercise more. I need to lose some weight. I’m not miserable and I’m not feeling all lumpy and useless. Changes need to happen, though, for my health, for my happiness. No one else can handle them but me.
I may peter out again, who knows. All I can do is try. They (the experts, whoever they are) say that it takes 21 days? 66 days? Let’s go with a happy medium and say 44 days to create a new habit. That’s 44 days of consistently doing something every day before it moves from the realm of ‘ZOMG I MUST THINK ON THIS OR I’LL NEVER REMEMBER’ to ‘cool, I can do it without much thought at all’.
That’s as good a starting place as anywhere, I think.
Thankfully, I know myself better than to try to do all these HUGE and MONUMENTAL changes all at once. Little steps, little things. And not taking on too much at one time.
One thing is clear. The holiday season, starting from the middle of November through the beginning of the New Year is absolutely the worst in the way of creativity. It’s absolutely the hardest time of the year for me to sit and get any writing done at all. Something I will be reflecting on as I move forward in the new year because it cannot continue. I don’t know if it’s having to adjust my schedule to accommodate, to create a new schedule or learning to draw boundaries, enforce them and stubbornly refuse to let anyone try to renegotiate where my lines rest.
I can assure myself on two vital facts. I will not join a gym and I will not go on a diet. Those two paths are sure, straight paths to failure for me. There are options, small things I can do, when reinforced into habit, which will translate into huge gains on the far end.
After some thought, I’m not going to continue with the ‘thirty days’ meme. The last two questions (because day thirty is ‘tag someone else to answer this’), to be honest, I can’t get excited about and I’m not going to inflict this on someone else either. What would there be for me to say other than ‘meh, no, not really’. Not riveting conversation and so, I leave it at twenty seven answered and draw a line through it as done. It seemed like a good idea at the time when I started it. Maybe later on down the road I will retool the questions to be more interesting and try again. Be the creator/originator of my own writer’s meme!
the glass 'possum 