Listless

I've been feeling kind of 'off' lately and I'm going to blame it on the New Year. I am one of those people who regularly takes time to reflect on my life, my situation. I take stock and measure up. I usually put in place a plan for some change or improvement. However, this New Year took me by surprise. I wasn't ready. I think this is the first New Year in at least a few years that I didn't have some resolve to do something, anything to make this year better than the last. And the realization that I was caught without goals, without motivation, left me feeling really quite listless.

That feeling spread a little. I felt lonely, confused, overweight, in the wrong career, negative, and far worse - entirely stagnant (my inner core abhors being stagnant and my exterior self is constantly proving it to the world). A part of me kind of panicked. The cooler headed part of me decided to stay calm, think it over, and see if I couldn't get myself back on track.

After spending some time pondering over all of this, I think I'm having a mild case of that syndrome that recent grads feel. In these past few years, things have been pretty well laid out for me. Granted, they were that way because I'd lined them up to be that way, but sure enough there was always something 'obvious' to work on: plan a wedding, learn how to be a wife, make a home out of the new house, prepare for a baby, learn how to be a mother. This year is wide open. Not to say that I couldn't continue to be better at any and all of these things, it's just that it's much less urgent and immediate.

Last night, I started to come around. Frankly, I was tired of listening to myself be so negative and whiny. Maybe this isn't going to be the year of great and spectacular, life altering change or achievement. I guess, considering where I was this time last year and the eager anticipation I had for 2008, it's easy to see how 2009 could feel less lustrous. This morning, I started composing some mental lists. Things that I'd like to do in the next twelve months. They are all little things. I also found a question that haunts me every year that I can chew over for a bit more again this year. Maybe this will be the year that it gets answered. Who knows.

As I write it all down, now though, I realize that this could be the year for breathing it all in, for smelling the roses, for basking in my extreme good fortune. I have a husband who is my favorite person in the world, a daughter I adore, a family who I love and who loves me, a home to comfort me and keep me warm, friends to laugh and play with. Perhaps the most important and challenging resolution for the upcoming year is to every day demonstrate my desperate and extreme gratitude.

Talk to you soon,

B.