It’s still the new year

I’ve been feeling a bit behind with my start into the new year.

My resolutions sit half-finished in the new journal I got for Christmas. I haven’t come here to write about the freshness of the new year or my plans for it. The feeling of a brand new start that usually takes over my heart on January 1, slowing my every movement into something I regard as precious and auspicious, well that feeling hasn’t come yet. I suspect it simply may not come. I didn’t unroll my yoga mat again until four days into the year. I haven’t picked up a book this week, despite the resolution I know I will make to read more. I didn’t stay up until midnight or even wake for long enough to watch the ball drop on New Year’s Eve. I didn’t choose a word for the year or, as Lindsey so perfectly notes, no word chose me.

Besides cutting my hair, I’ve put no great divider between last year and this year.

I’ve sort of just rolled into 2016.

For twelve years, the ritual of sitting for hours in the soft spot between years to reflect and resolve was so important to me that I’d nearly breakdown without it. I was a resolute resolution maker. I believed that without that time and that reflection and those carefully written plans and goals and thoughts, the new year would surely dissolve into a formless mass of missed opportunities and I’d never truly grow or move forward. I believed it was those pages upon pages and hours upon hours spent writing until my hand ached that paved the way for me to live my best life.

That’s all been changing lately. Maybe it’s a phase. Maybe it’s just that the new year fell awkwardly in the cycle and craziness of life for me this year. Maybe I’m just getting older.

I ended last year with goals not achieved. With plans unfinished. The things I had written down at the start of the year never realized. The word that chose me at the start of last year? I think it walked away mid-way through.

For those same twelve years, that whole mess of unfinished business would have driven me mad. How do I start a new year when the remnants of last year are still tumbling at my feet? I’d have devoted serious time over the holiday break to gather that mess up, put things back together and polish the whole thing so that I could dive into the new year shiny and bright.

But despite the mess and the word abandonment, 2015 was good. Around the mess of the unfinished, I achieved some seriously big goals and painted large sections of the life I want to live. By the end, I felt the weariness of all of that work in my bones. So over the holiday break, I worked a little and slept a little. I played with some legos and watched my children sing and wandered through an art gallery. There was an buzzing inside. I couldn’t sit still and rather than fighting that fluttering feeling, I went with it, and refused to sit long enough to write more than a few sentences. And I simply decided to be ok with that. I’m changing and growing. This new mindset is just part of it.

So here we are, more than a week into 2016, and so far, so good. The year is not a formless mass of mess, at least not yet anyway. I have plans and goals and even some pretty great accomplishments so far.

I’m not swearing off of resolutions all together. I may go back and finish what I started in that journal. I may, as the year settles in and the buzzing energy fades, quietly commit a few goals to paper. By the end of this year I may find myself twitching until I can sit with my journal for a solid afternoon of reflection. But, for now, I’m going to just roll with this moment.

If you, too, haven’t really formalized your resolutions just yet in this new year, take my hand. Let’s roll together.

Happy 2016!