Happy New Year everyone from my family to yours! It’s great to be back. This morning I was up again for my morning meditation and yoga session – which isn’t yoga anymore, it’s half an hour of core work, not the easiest way to get back into waking up so early I can tell you: I could feel every single one of those mince pies I ate over Christmas. I took a proper break and went on holiday when the girls broke up from school, and the wonderful thing is that now, going back ‘to work’ feels like everything is clicking back in to place. I’m ready!
I didn’t think I was going to be, though. For the first time in a very long time, I didn’t have any New Year’s Resolutions at the turn of the year. I usually decide on these early in December, as things are starting to wind up and the joy and sparkle of the season makes everything seem possible. It’s easy to start putting plans into place so that going into the new year I know where I’m headed. To get into January and not have any was unusual and unsettling. I had some plans for the business, but these didn’t feel like resolutions, as such, they felt like on going development. Was the difference that it wasn’t a hobby anymore? It was, literally, on-going development? I couldn’t think what I wanted to change, or to do. My main thing, outside of work, has for years been making soap and crafting but now that it is my day job, I don’t have a ‘thing’ anymore. So if my resolutions where now part of a business plan, what was left to do?
I know that there are people who don’t make New Year’s resolutions (my husband is not really one for setting a list) but I enjoy the challenge and structure, and I find that I stick to them and, for the most part, I see them through.
The first week in January came to end, and I was still rudderless. The first week back at work was planned, the girls were back at school. No New Year’s Resolutions. Was this the year I just didn’t make them? Was I over thinking it? What would happen without them? Would I lose some sense of myself that was project driven and needed a list of expectations? Would the year fly off course into a strange and unpredictable future? Of course, I realised that that had already happened, and that last year, despite that fact of a pandemic; multiple periods of isolation; lockdowns; redundancy and great uncertainty I had not only managed to keep my previous year’s resolutions but in fact I had thrived and made other goals and met those too, and when I couldn’t I’d adapted. Maybe I didn’t need a New Years resolution, maybe I just needed to go back to basics.
So I sat and I thought about it, and I remembered that right and left shoes were only thought up a century ago and that creativity is about turning up what is already there. I realised that I already had the makings of a resolution all around me, that I had done what I always do: I’d started early (in some cases years!) and filled the house with projects that needed to be started, and this new year was the year for them.
My 2022 resolution is to finish what I’ve started, that can be finished, and just to carry on moving forward with everything else. I think it will be enough.
What have you decided to do this year?
