As some of you may know, I am incredibly busy. Just how busy? Let’s see: Monkey is 5 and started school this year, Pumpkin is 2 and the less said about that the better, I’m taking 11 hours in school this semester, I have 3 blogs (how did that happen?), and I have 1 house to care for.

Because of all the different things going on in my life I decided a long time ago that New Year’s resolutions were just not going to work for me. I love the idea of a fresh start every year, a fresh chance to get it right. But we all know that New Year’s resolutions usually don’t last very long. I needed something with more heft, some kind of resolve that I could live with beyond the new year.

A couple of years ago, with a toddler and an infant in the House, I looked at my life and realized that even with all that I had, I wasn’t satisfied. I felt like I wasn’t doing all I could for myself and, therefore, for my family. There was a missing piece, a neglected corner of my life, something I should have done a long time before. I needed a Bachelor’s degree, but saying that and actually making it happen are two different things.

That’s the way it is with most things we want to do, that’s why every year we make New Year’s resolutions and every year we don’t follow through on them. It’s too easy to say, “I need to lose weight” or “This year I’ll stick to a budget” or “This is the year my house will stay organized”. But we never mean it, these declarations are half-hearted at best. They’re the socially expected lip-service we pay to the ideals of positive change. I think the problem is not that most people don’t want to make positive changes, but that people don’t know which are the best positive changes for them. So each year they sit down and write a list totally unsuited to their lives and then, unsurprisingly, fail to follow through.

There are all these things just screaming at us to be done: things we want to do, need to do, don’t want to do, things other people want us to do, things society as a whole tells us we should do. How do we figure out what is right for us? I had to figure out what was right for me, nobody else, me. Like everyone else I had a long list of things to do: lose weight, get a degree (in what?), budget, organize my messy House, quit yelling, be more patient, speak up for myself, be a better mom (whatever that means), dress better, write a book, get it published, eat out less, cook more, try to stay on top of the daily Household chores, quit saving every piece of paper that makes it to my hands.

OK, that’s a long list and I can’t do everything all at once, nor would I want to. How do I winnow it down to just things that are really right for me? The crucial things, the major things, the things that are absolutely essential to my continued happiness. How do I figure out, from the bewildering array of choices, what direction my life should take? Well, I came up with a plan that works for me and I hope that maybe it will help someone else with a bewildering array of choices before them. But right now I have to go pretend I know what I’m doing with this mothering-thingy. More tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 11:52 am and is filed under Living, Study, The Process. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.