EVERY YEAR A NEW BEGINNING

The New Year, as readers of this blog know, is one of my favorite times.  A fresh new page on which I'm ready to write my future.  With great excitement I start each year with a Grand Plan.  Over time I've learned and now even anticipate that the beginnings and ends of years can look quite different from each other.  The Grand Plan is becoming more and more a flexible structure.  

I've been retired a full three years now, and thus far my philosophy has been "Say YES!"  "Do it all!"  "Jump right off the Deep End!"  I've done that, and enjoyed every minute and every activity I've explored.  Now, I'm ready to become a little more discriminating.  There are some activities I've had on the back burner the whole three years I've been retired, and it's time to give them some priority.  That requires choices.  That requires NOT doing something else.  Uh-oh.  But I like them ALL!  

 

Besides taking some things off the back burner, another impetus for ratcheting back was an unexpected consequence of the "Say YES!" philosophy.  I got myself pretty over-YES!'d this past summer, and found my body can't really tell the difference between work-stress and fun-stress. It manifested as a several-months-long bout of TMJ syndrome.  I've not had any trouble with it for years, but have no doubt it was a clear sign that it was time to make some changes.  I slowly effected relief through treatment and some immediate adjustments to my too-enthusiastic schedule. 

 2016, then, is the year in which I'll  decide which activities are most dear to me.  As I make choices, I expect to find that some things are relatively easily given up; they in fact don't have enough qualities to satisfy me for the long haul. Or I've been doing them for a long time and they can go to make room for something new.  Some activities may lend themselves to intermittent participation very satisfactorily.  It's in me to make all these decisions and choices on January 1.  Go in swinging and let the chips fall where they may.  The more reasonable path is to take the time to explore each activity in a considered way and see what satisfies me most deeply.  Yeah, I think that's what I'll do.

"We will open the book.

 Its pages are blank. 

We are going to put words on them ourselves.

 The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day."
Edith Lovejoy Pierce