Beginnings and Things

Hey, look at that you guys, 2013 ended and 2014 is beginning! Whenever the fall semester began, I began this blog with a blogpost about how I like when things begin. It's so hopeful you know? That's the point of resolutions.

I hope 2014 is the year that I'm finally thin. That it's the year that I finally organize my living and/or working spaces. I hope it's the year I finally throw out the t-shirts I never wear. I hope it's the year I become softer and kinder through an increase in random acts of kindness or selfless acts of service. I hope I go to church more. I hope my skin clears up. I hope it's the year that boys finally like me. I hope I find mental peace through a routine of eight hours of sleep and evening meditation. I hope I'm able to save up some money so that I can travel in 2015. I hope I quit coffee or nicotine or alcohol or brownies. I hope I read enough books to average one per week. I hope I'm able to write thank you cards and birthday cards more consistently.

I'm all for resolutions. Every Christmas Eve I sit down and write a list of twenty-five things I'd like to accomplish in the next year. Not only that, but I usually do a lot of them. In the upper-teens, I think. I know that kind of sounds like I fail, because there's a handful that I never got to, but I never feel like a failure at the end of the year. It's 2014 and I still haven't learned how to turn when I knit.

Resolutions can be very good. They make you think about the person that you really want to be, and they help you take strives to become that person. Which is good, because whether we'd like to or not, we're going to be a different person ten years from now. Through the decisions we make today, we start to shape who that person is.

But let's also be wary of the pressure to change who we are. While it's fabulous to decide that, throughout the next year, you would like to eat more greens and less brownies or that you would like to write 750+ words per day, it's important not to get sucked into the "inherently flawed" mentality. Inherent flaws. That's what, at least can be, promoted by resolution culture. I think sometimes we get so wrapped up in the fact that we need to change that we don't step back and appreciate who we are. It's like we get this idea that we aren't good the way that we are right now, that we have to change in order to be acceptable and lovable and worthy of whatever it is we think that we aren't worthy of.

Look, in ten years the person that you are right now won't exist. So maybe let 2014 be the year that you appreciate who that person is? Maybe let 2014 be the year that you think good things about your reflection, the year that you forgive yourself for sleeping in, the year that you go a little easier on yourself. You know?

Don't... don't feel guilty or angry or pathetic or whatever if, on January seventh, you eat a slice of cake on the same day that you drank a Dr. Pepper. I'm not saying to throw all your resolutions into the air and shout, "THIS IS AS GOOD AS I AM GOING TO GET!" I'm just saying, try not beat yourself up for little slip-ups. Because you're already pretty spectacular, you know? You're literate and kind and know a couple of good recipes and dang that's a nice sweater you've got on, you're really workin' it today.

Plus your hair looks fabulous. Did you do something different with it today?