Begin as you mean to go on

I have a friend who says “begin as you mean to go on” at the beginning of the year; in other words, start January 1st with what you’d like to carry on throughout the year. Since my January 1st starts with family and friends and a big slow breakfast that slowly morphs into lunch and eventually live music and naps and then dinner with the people you’ve just spent the whole day with…? I mean, that is pretty awesome.

So far this year I’ve been spending a lot of time at the whiskey bar (AND NOBODY WAS SURPRISED).

I’m feeling a little behind in making plans for this coming year, work-wise. Well, sort of. I have plans, I just haven’t had both time and brain power to write them all down and plot them out on the calendar… which means that about now I’m stuck in that Catch-22 of needing to start on plans I haven’t had the brain power to chart out because my brain is so full of all these plans and I can’t find the peace of mind to sit and write them all out to clear my head. Ugh, is that convoluted, or what?! BRAINS ARE DUMB.

It doesn’t help that I’m once again disenchanted with business groups in general, which always try to push me in the direction of BIGGER BETTER STRONGER FASTER and for the love of Peanut Butter Sandwiches why isn’t BEING WHERE I AM enough? I don’t want to hire people to do my work so I can come up with ideas and have them execute it. I don’t want to wholesale. I don’t want to do a craft show every week. I don’t want to beg or pay Instagram “influencers” to shill my art.

So I guess it’s helpful that the yearly workbook I usually get to help chart out HaldeCraft for the next 12 months was put out too late this year for me to consider using it. It usually comes out in late October and this year it came out, I think, the day after Christmas….? Two days after? So I got a different workbook and I’m getting ready to read through it and see if I agree with what it suggests.

Speaking of suggestions… something else another friend is talking about a lot is her Word of the Year. I’m sure if you’ve been on the Internet you’ve heard of this; you choose a word to sum up everything you want from the year — Mindfulness, Intention, Joy, Recovery, Courage, Simplify… you get the idea. Maybe you’ve even done one? I’d love to know what you thought! It’s been suggested to me that I choose one, to help narrow down my focus and trajectory for the year.

Here’s my problem with the Word of the Year… my mood changes probably 643 times a day. In a morning when my word might be “Intention”… by lunchtime it might have changed to “Breathe” (can “don’t murder anyone today” be summed up in one single word?). So I’m freaked out by choosing ONLY ONE WORD. How do I know it’ll still be my word by the end of the year? Heck, by the end of January?! OH THE PRESSURE.

I also see a lot of people making resolutions, and also talking about how they shun the word “resolution” and prefer the word “intention”. So instead of “this year I resolve to start _____”, instead they say “this year I intend to _____” (fill in the blank). The theory is that there’s such baggage caught up in the word “resolution” but New Year’s Eve is such a liminal point that it’s a good time to make changes, so…. pick a new word to represent it? I guess?

I was recently asked what my intentions were for 2019. I had to be honest… my intentions, my resolutions (if you will), are the same as they always are, as they are every day when I wake up. I want to be a better person than I was the day before. I want to be kinder, more generous with my heart and my time, more trustworthy, more dependable, more of a champion to the marginalized. I want to be the light. But I want those things every day. Every morning when I wake up is a chance to start again, to do better, feel deeper, reach farther, support stronger. Every morning I begin as I mean to go on. Which apparently, this morning, means that I am word-vomity and disjointed and writing a blog post to avoid doing other more pressing work. Sigh.