Ahhh a new year. 2010. I think it has a nice ring to it. I like new beginnings, and for the first time I am not a student anymore. The fall no longer is the beginning of my year. January is. I enjoy thinking through what a new start means. I realize there is all kinds of research that says January is actually not the best time of the year to try to change habits in our lives--it's the dead of winter and that really isn't all that inspiring for most people! But that hasn't deterred me. (I live in LA, there is no winter here....not "real" winter anyways!) I have had fun this past week thinking through different areas of my life and things I either want to hang on to or things I want to change about my habits, patterns, or lifestyle. I realized just how many facets of life I have (we all have). Usually most of us make a goal that centers on one area of life, without really thinking through other aspects of our lives (this is always what I have done in the past). But I wanted this year to be different. We all have our physical health. We all have some type of spiritual aspect of our lives. We have social aspects of our lives etc. So I decided that this year, I was going to make several goals for 6 different areas of my life. I know, that sounds a bit extreme, but some are simple and some are going to take most of the year to accomplish. This is the first year I have ever written them down on a piece of paper the perfect size to paperclip into my day planner, so I'll have them in front of me each day. I know that many of you are thinking I'm nuts, that I'll probably fail (and you are right, on some of these goals, I will probably fail, but that is not a reason to not try!) I'm not going to share all my goals here, I'll do that with a few friends for accountability, but here on the blog I will share my 6 categories/spaces of life that I thought through, and I'll give you a couple of examples of things on my list this year.
1. Social life--here I wrote down specific people in my life I want to be better about maintaining contact with, and gave myself a goal for how often I wanted to make sure I was working on getting in touch with them. Sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed at the number of people I want to keep in touch with, and it felt really good to make a list on paper and make a plan for how I'd love to do that better this year.
2. Spiritual health--one of my goals here was to practice a technology-free sabbath one day a week. I don't need to be connected to my computer or text messaging all the time, so one of my goals is to turn them all the way off for a day and take space to do something else.
3. Personal life--this was a fun category :) My 28 books that I want to read this year are in this category, as is the goal of learning to knit something other than a scarf this year!
4. Professional life--writing down a specific number of hours I wanted to devote to job hunting, paperwork needed to future ordination stuff etc went in this category.
5. Physical health--goals for how often I wanted to do different types of work outs went here.
6. Marriage--we all have things we do that negatively impact those we live with. I spent some time thinking and praying about a few things I wanted to work on in order to love and serve my husband even more.
I'm not superwoman. I won't be perfect at all of these. I won't even be close on some. But I resolve to stop making excuses as to why I can't work on some of these things. In 2010, I resolve to try. And that's all I expect of myself.
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