A New Year

A wish for a happy, healthy, prosperous, and peaceful …..2009 for all who venture here.

For the past week or so I have been on slow speed. Rushing from an intense time at work into the relatively unstructured time off that I take between Christmas and New Years. This sends me slightly into not necessarily a free-fall but like a kite without a tail: wobbling around in the wind currents trying to find bearings and doing enough to stay up in the air. Isn’t that what vacations are about, regaining one’s bearings, trying to recharge? When thrown in with end of the year holidays that wobble can get a little too wobbly and I a little too introspective.

Traditionally as the calendar flips we tend to look back and to assess the year that has past. Was it good, was it bad, and are we glad it is over?

There was a lot of negative going on this year that seemed to weigh heavy. I’ve attended more funerals last year than I can remember in a single year, and I am not at an age where my peers are naturally dying off. The economy and the uncertainty that it has brought and the continuing conflicts around the world cast a heavy shadow far across the landscape, at least in my mind and world.

But even with these I would not necessarily call this a bad year for there have also been many good things that have gone on this year. My family is well and have been all year and we treasure the time that we spend with each other; the kids are both having a great year at school and having new experiences that I wouldn’t have dreamed of experiencing at their age; the excitement (and parent apprehension) of college shopping for my oldest (wow have things changed); meeting new people and having new experiences; while my work is stressful it is ever expanding and I have to keep reminding myself that this is good.

We have a tradition in our family, started several years ago when my wife read about it somewhere. Throughout the year we record on small pieces of paper good things that happen to one of us. Anyone can put one in and it can be something significant or as simple as a sleepover with a friend or the stub from a movie or play or concert. We collect these in a Mason jar and as the year progresses it fills up. Then on either New Years Eve or New Years Day the family gathers around the table and we pass the jar around, each of us pulling out a slip of paper and reading it out loud. We then transpose the list for posterity sake. It’s a fun tradition and also fun to look back at the list years later.

I don’t do resolutions. I do set goals but they are not necessarily based on the calendar year. Last year I set a goal to start to run, do a 5k under 30 minutes and a 10k under an hour and in the process get back in shape and loose some extra weight. I am pleased that I met these goals and it is only an injury that has sidelined me from running and I am anxious to get back and truly miss the feeling of going out for a 6 mile run.

Another goal was to work on writing and that is where this blog came from. I am one of many who became inspired by the writings of Sharyn on the Caleb blog and decided to give it a try.

Through this venture I have met some very nice people, not really met physically but in the virtual world. I have learned much more about the technology and about writing. I have really got to like having a camera around to snap things up when I see them, even if it was only me who thought the pictures were good. (But then I didn’t care if they were a slight bit fuzzy). I have learned that my writing in the beginning was more thoughtful and deep rooted and came from topics stored up and that my writings in the fall were more forced because they were forced as I was working to develop some discipline. In some cases didn’t write here or elsewhere because the writing was stuck and it didn’t seem to matter. I learned that this deep writing is something I want to get back to.

I learned that as I wrote as I thought out loud and wrote when my moods were not good, that there were people who very nicely became concerned and tried to help and this surprised me and caught me off guard, even thought this is a very public place to air your thoughts. [I have a wonderfully supportive wife and kids and a few wonderful friends but I am no longer use to that response from people I don’t know well and initially kind of suspicious (absolutely nothing personal–out there). Where the hell did that come from? Why do I go there rather than accept the genuineness of good people? I do know where much of it came from; the brutality of corporate employment/ unemployment [yes non profits can be brutal] has left me with bruises that have been difficult to heal and definitely more cautious.]

I learned that some people picked up on the writings that I did on other blogs and launched writing of their own off these thoughts and that was wild and exciting to see and read. I assumed when I wrote here and on other blogs that there was this tiny audience and that what I wrote was as much for me as the other person so when I heard from people I didn’t know who were comforted by my words or thought they were good, I was and am blown away.

Someone else reading this might again say, poor guy that he minimizes this so much, but that is not really where I am at.

As I said early on in the year, writing in this way is something new to me and I am not use to getting feedback in that way. Professionally I need to write letters, proposals and do technical writing and the best feedback you can get is that you have been successful in carefully choosing your words or that there was nothing wrong with it or that it was successful in conveying what you want to do or get. Not getting negative feedback in that sense is very positive in a backwards way.

So this has also been a good growth experience for me as has been the running and all of the other positive things that have happened. In that sense and in many other ways it has been a good year.

I am learning ever so slowly that adversity and challenges to me are not necessarily negative and the future not automatically something to be wary of. I am continuing to see the lessons in things that have not gone well and to put those lessons in perspective. This is good and a goal that I will continue to pursue and as well as to continue to work to again to be okay letting my guard down to let others in.