Assessment/Adjustments

While it is hard to say good-bye to another year, I do find that the start of the new year does bring a sense of renewal that is refreshing. Perhaps it is because of the cold weather, or despite it. But I find myself not as much assessing the last year, but now making the adjustments that one makes at the beginning of a new one.

As the year goes by, habits are borne upon the duties of the everyday. Sometimes they are habits that are good, sometimes they are necessary. Sometimes they come from the drudgery of sameness, or the crisises of the moment or the slow slippage of time. Changes come and new habits are formed. Something is added or subtracted. And as the year progresses, choas and clutter of life adds to the mixture and by the end of the year some of the habits have become a burdensome cloak under which I hide.

So now I readjust. I resolve to go to bed earlier, get up earlier, be on time and de-clutter. I dust off the recipes that I tried last year and then got tired of. To reach out more to people in my life and to spend less time "in my interior walls". To accept certain chaos but not produce more. To help myself as well as others. To really look at my children, my life and my surroundings anew.

And I throw off the cloak of last year.