Taking Stock
A new year is fast approaching. Can you feel it sneaking up on you? It wears socks so that you don't realize it is so very close until it pounces, knocking all the air out so that you are forced to exhale.
Funny how we take an accounting at the end of the year instead of stopping along the way to shift our course. Well, at least I do. I notice the time going by, the quickness of it, the fleeting moments that vanish like snowflakes on a too-warm day. But it is now, in the final week of a waning year, when I really start to see how much has changed. Or how much has stayed the same.
In the year I was turning 30 (not this year but last) my biggest goal was to get fit. Not thin, or skinny or any of those things. I'm genetically coded not to be those things I think. (Or perhaps I tell myself so to make me feel better.) I fell pitifully, woefully short. Do you want to know what happened? At the start of the summer I dropped 15 lbs without really trying. I just did it. And then someone noticed and commented on how great I looked. I immediately found my lost 15 lbs and never let them go again. Because someone looked at me, saw me, noticed changes. It was frightening.
Last year I set the same goal and still haven't reached it. It's like a twinkling star just outside my peripheral vision. When I turn my head just so, it sparkles but then it vanishes before I can pin it down.
I have other goals and dreams.
Go back to school. Learn another language and speak/understand it. Take a photography class or a cooking class. Enroll Carly in dance. Get Josh into fencing. All dreams on a shelf that tease me and flicker just out of reach.
But I'm still grabbing for them with at least one open hand.
So, now, as the year winds down I sit and think of those things. Their lack is a dark pit in my stomach, a void I know I need to fill. The questions of whys and hows seem to block out the path, but somehow in 2009 I've got to push my way through.
Because time never stops. No matter the outcome of your schemes and dreams, time pushes onward and drags you with it.
That seems kind of depressing.
But, even if we do get dragged along in that never-ending march, we always get to start again. Every day, every year, every moment, every thought is a blank page on which to write.
A fresh breath.
Funny how we take an accounting at the end of the year instead of stopping along the way to shift our course. Well, at least I do. I notice the time going by, the quickness of it, the fleeting moments that vanish like snowflakes on a too-warm day. But it is now, in the final week of a waning year, when I really start to see how much has changed. Or how much has stayed the same.
In the year I was turning 30 (not this year but last) my biggest goal was to get fit. Not thin, or skinny or any of those things. I'm genetically coded not to be those things I think. (Or perhaps I tell myself so to make me feel better.) I fell pitifully, woefully short. Do you want to know what happened? At the start of the summer I dropped 15 lbs without really trying. I just did it. And then someone noticed and commented on how great I looked. I immediately found my lost 15 lbs and never let them go again. Because someone looked at me, saw me, noticed changes. It was frightening.
Last year I set the same goal and still haven't reached it. It's like a twinkling star just outside my peripheral vision. When I turn my head just so, it sparkles but then it vanishes before I can pin it down.
I have other goals and dreams.
Go back to school. Learn another language and speak/understand it. Take a photography class or a cooking class. Enroll Carly in dance. Get Josh into fencing. All dreams on a shelf that tease me and flicker just out of reach.
But I'm still grabbing for them with at least one open hand.
So, now, as the year winds down I sit and think of those things. Their lack is a dark pit in my stomach, a void I know I need to fill. The questions of whys and hows seem to block out the path, but somehow in 2009 I've got to push my way through.
Because time never stops. No matter the outcome of your schemes and dreams, time pushes onward and drags you with it.
That seems kind of depressing.
But, even if we do get dragged along in that never-ending march, we always get to start again. Every day, every year, every moment, every thought is a blank page on which to write.
A fresh breath.
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