“I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.”
During the process of Googling around for inspiration to kick off my new year resolution piece, I stumbled across this quote by Anaïs Nin. Needless to say, it’s proved the perfect inspiration for my post, which, in case you didn’t get it from the title, is about NOT making resolutions.
You could say, that that is my New Year’s resolution.
If you read my last post, you’ll know that I’ve stopped trying to dictate and perfectly plan every moment of my life. Because I’ve come to the realisation that I simply can’t live like that. Only took me 26 years and countless diaries, planners, lists, spreadsheets etc. etc. to get there.
I know so many people that are so perfectly organised and “together” – to those people, I have so much respect for you. If you feel stressed without that structure, then you do you.
Essential work organisation aside, I am your polar opposite and am forever fated to be that person who stresses myself out with those lists; to be the happy-go-lucky, “everything will be alright in the end” type individual. That person who triple books herself for catch ups with friends; the person who ends up faffing until the last minute. But that’s kind of how I’ve got through life so far, and you start how you mean to go on, right?
So instead of organising and quantifying the next 365 (give or take) days of the year around the number of posts I want to write or my goal weight by 2021 or whatever it may be, I’m just going to get on with it and write when I fancy it or gym when I remember to.
I guess what it boils down to is remembering to enjoy life as it comes. There’s enough happening in my world that stresses me out right now, without the added fact that I haven’t lost a pound a week or finished The Grapes of Wrath yet or I haven’t posted for almost a month AGAIN.
To put it simply, I so often feel that I’ve failed if I’ve dropped the ball on my quantifiable resolutions by the end of January and that’s no way to start a new year, let alone a new decade. So my new year’s resolution is to stop resolving things if only to keep myself sane. And that can’t be a bad thing.
Just Emma Things 