Words

In March of last year, about 5 months after my major breakup, I decided that I was ready to start dating again.  I had gotten past my initial euphoria at leaving a bad relationship, allowed myself to grieve the good parts, and reached the point where I felt okay with being single.  I was ready.

As I was getting back into dating, I distinctly remember thinking about how good a mental space I was in.  I felt like I had worked through a lot of my old demons (anxiety, self doubt) and kind of figured things out.  I understood shit.  I can even remember, in one particularly arrogant moment, thinking that I had learned most of the big things in life and really didn't have that much more to learn.

(Cue deep laughter from the universe.)

In my last post of an unsuccessful NaBloPoMo, I wrote somewhat glibly about starting to meditate, completely diminishing the magnitude of the impact it has had on me.  On one level, it has done what I expected it to:  made me appreciate the present moment more, helped lower anxiety, and improved my always inconsistent sleep.  What I completely didn't expect was the deeper changes it has brought about*.

Through meditation, I am learning to see everything more clearly.  I am getting more comfortable with difficult things and learning to sit with them so that I can understand them better.  Habits, thought patterns, relationships.  The last half of this year feels like a veritable explosion of self understanding and personal change.  Far more has happened than I can possibly capture in a single New Year's post.

It became popular a few years ago to choose a word for the year as a way of setting an intention, and while I didn't do it at the beginning of 2018, in retrospect, my word for the year was clearly growth.

And what for 2019?  Mostly, I want to keep going on the path that I'm already on.  I want to remain in the present moment, enjoying it when I can and learning from it when I can't. 

2019 is going to be all about mindfulness.

*This whole post feels so hokey, and if I'd read someone else's version of it a year ago, I'm sure I would have rolled my eyes and accused the writer of having drunk the magical kombucha. 

Do I Need to Make Resolutions?

Since the end of 2017, I've been thinking a lot about writing a resolutions post.  I've been reading everyone else's posts, in which they talk about their goals of saving X dollars or losing Y pounds, and I've been thinking I should do that too.  But as I read these posts and think about writing my own, I find myself paralyzed by the fact that I have no idea what to resolve.

My challenge with resolutions is twofold.  First, I am not a person to make a resolution for the sake of doing so.  If I commit to doing something, it has to be because I believe that doing so is going to make me happier or is somehow going to make me a better person/make the world a better place.  Second, I am really, really bad at keeping resolutions.  Like my recurrent resolution to exercise.  A look at my last post about exercise shows that it starts with a paragraph bemoaning my failures:

"Oh exercise, how I struggle with you.  With just a quick look through the blog, it's easy to find multiple posts in which I'm either committing to exercising more or lamenting the fact that I've failed at exercising more (see here, here, here, here, and here for just a few examples).  It's not a habit that comes easily to me."

I worry that committing to anything, especially exercise, will inevitably lead to me writing a follow up post in a month or two talking about how miserably I've failed at my commitment.  Which makes me ask the question, why do I feel like I need to write a resolution post?

While part of this feeling is just the feeling that I should be doing what everyone else is doing, I think another part of it is a desire to create some sort of...shape in my life.  I feel like I'm in a phase in life in which I go to work, pay off debt, save for retirement, learn a few more words of French, and keep repeating ad nauseam.  I'm 7-10 years away from hitting FIRE, and I will likely keep working even when I reach FIRE, so this is not going to be a short phase.  There is an incredible monotony to this stage, and I wonder if I could somehow break up the monotony with a resolution.  2018 will be the year that I become a true minimalist/ban all shopping/run a marathon...something other than just the year in which I keep going to work every day and slowly trudge forward with life.

Hmmm.  This post is turning out much darker than I had expected.  Maybe because I'm alone on a Friday night and it's -26C outside and I drank a glass of Malbec before I started writing?  Maybe because I got word that a longtime patient of mine died yesterday, and I can't quite believe that he's gone, so the sadness that I haven't yet allowed myself to feel is coming out in other ways?

There is part of me that is longing desperately for a solution to this.  To be able to say that I am going to do X in 2018 and everything is going to be perfect.  But maybe life doesn't work that way.  Maybe it's harder than we all like to pretend it is, and we can't solve everything with a resolutions post.