Happy New Year!
Today entered with a beautiful sunrise and left with a gorgeous sunset. What more could we want for the first of the year?
I’ve come to think that the day I enter a new year should be almost like any other day, that making resolutions for the entire year ahead isn’t really sensible. Anything can happen in the course of 12 months, and sometimes our focus changes completely due to forces outside our control. So instead of thinking about resolutions, I spent a lot of time in the past few days reviewing not only this past year, but my entire adult life. The whole-life review has partly to do with a journal project, basically sorting through a mass of accumulated pages from years of personal journal keeping and coming up with a way to edit them down to their essence and organize them, to preserve the memories without all the bulk. In the process I’ve read back through pages that I wrote at 18, 19, and 20 years of age. Wow, what a kid I was — and still am, in some ways. But it made me think a lot about choices and where they lead us, and how we define happiness and success at different times in our lives, especially how our focus shifts, sometimes suddenly, and what we spend our thoughts on. It made me face some of my regrets that I hadn’t considered or thought about in years.
Those regrets include hurting people’s feelings in any way — and I’ve committed some doozies, usually by accident but in hurtful, unthinking ways just the same. I regret changing my college major from English, leaving college without a degree, spending too much time in college distracted by and pining over young men, imagining potential relationships where it should’ve been obvious to me they didn’t exist, joining a church at 19, which distracted me even more from school and may have been what finally drew me away from it altogether — there were boys there (gag me with another repetitive, pining journal page) — and taking religion too seriously for even those few years, mistaking it for a deeper form of spirituality that it was not. Let me say right here, young women put far too much emphasis, or at least we did back then, on finding mates. It’s absurd. Though I eventually did, and have been with him for going on 25 years now, he wasn’t one of those responsible for distracting me in school, so you see all that pining back then was a complete waste. Later in life, I regret not buying a house sooner (though I’m not sure how that would’ve been possible earlier), not taking more vacations when I could afford them, buying even half of the magazines I ever purchased, spending rather than saving most of the excess I finally earned for a few years (and still not spending it on vacations), not buying a new car before I retired, and not giving up on being a novelist sooner. I’m serious about that — seven novels with no sale is too much — enough already!
In spite of those regrets, I’m pretty happy with most of my choices, especially in my spouse, and even in some of the jobs I didn’t like at the time but which were worth the opportunities and the friends they brought me. In fact all my experiences, including many I regret, taught me something of value.
Regrets are a waste too, so I won’t dwell on them, or on dreams or plans for the future. Instead I want to focus on now, on how I’m doing and what I plan in just the next few days or weeks. If there’s anything else I need to focus on more of the time, at this point in my life, it’s the same things I think we should always focus on, all our lives. Most of the people I know spend too much worry on whether we’re good enough, or what we’d change about the past. And some of us spend too much time worrying what others should do, or what should happen that’s out of our control, to make us happy. So I’m reminding myself yet again:
Be happy with myself, as I am
Don’t worry whether others like or approve of me
Treat myself and others kindly and with respect
Don’t let anyone tell me how I should live my life, and don’t tell anyone how to live theirs, as long as they’re not harming anyone
Stand up for myself and for the rights of others
Love life, and live it with passion and an open mind to possible outcomes
Have no regrets — let them go
Follow my bliss and enjoy seeing others follow theirs
Own my life
Don’t worry at all, let tomorrow take care of itself
Learn from everything
All my best regards to you for 2008, and good luck in the coming year.
1.
Those are certainly good ideas. Letting the regrets go…that might be the hardest one of all. That and letting tomorrow take care of itself.
I don’t have any journals from when I was 18, thank goodness. I fear they’d be harrowing for me to read. And I’m not sure whether I’d be more horrified at how I’d been or that I was still much the same!
As for the choices, if you made a good choice on your spouse there’s nothing more important — except making the choice whether to marry or not.
Hope you have a great new year.
Comment by Eric Mayer — January 1, 2008 @ 8:00 pm
2.
It’s hard work keeping it moving along. Good luck.
Comment by Wayne — January 2, 2008 @ 12:58 am
3.
Great post, Barb! You’ve got your head on straight, so I’ve no doubt that your new year will be great!
Happy, happy,
Bev
Comment by Anonymous — January 2, 2008 @ 8:43 am
4.
Well I beg to differ with you: if you can write this beautifully yet concise and focused, you should not give up on writing.
Other than that, you do indeed have a terrific outlook here that will guide you (and help serve as a guide for others, me included) through the new year and beyond.
Wishes for all you wish for.
Comment by susan — January 2, 2008 @ 10:33 am
5.
Eric — Thanks, you have a good year too. I’m glad to have the bits of those old journals that contain a record of details and dates when certain things happened — to refresh my memory about some important life events. I’ve gained insight by rereading those parts. The rest is pretty much trash, but I’ll keep a taste of even the trash, and throw the rest out.
Wayne — Thanks!
Bev — Thanks! I think the year I was born there was a defect in the bolts that keep our heads screwed on straight. Mine need periodic adjustment. Ahh, that feels better now.
Susan — Thank you! I’m only giving up novel writing, unless and until I make a sale, not writing altogether. Writing is who I am. But when I began writing long fiction, I was like a kid with a new box of crayons. An overly ambitious kid, drawing on walls, obsessed with flowery nonsense. I used way too much pink at first. But I learned. Now my crayons are all stubby and the wrappers are worn off. Some of the colors are used up, gone. There are no longer any sharp edges to draw a fine line with. I think I got pretty good with them, while they lasted, but not apparently good enough to impress the people who provide fresh crayons and post the best drawings on the auditorium walls — even though the other kids and some of the teachers like some of what I’ve done. Now I’m tired of these old crayons and can’t afford a new box. Instead of sitting here feeling as old as my beat-up crayons, or waiting for them to be transformed by magic into new ones, I think I’ll try out that mound of clay over there for a while, and then maybe those glass beads. . . . All this time that I’ve fixated only on crayons, I’ve missed out on lots of other stuff. Nothing is forever, and it’s a brand new year.
Comment by Barbara — January 3, 2008 @ 11:33 am