We can light 'em up, up, up

Life is short. And so worth living.  But are we living it to the fullest?  I know I’m not.  I try to, I really do, but I am not.  There are only a handful of things that I am doing that I really WANT to be doing.  I am hugging my kids and my husband. I am dancing.  I think that really ends the list.  Everything else in my life is far too tight and scheduled and I don’t get the opportunity to kick back and enjoy.  A blog post I read recently talked about the things you save until some unknown time later, like the good candles or lotions or soaps.  I’ve thought about that before.  When is ‘later’?  When will you burn that good candle that Aunt Cindy gave you or use that really nice lotion you just picked up at Bath and Body?  I am guilty of this.  This is how my life seems to go as well.  I save the ‘good’ things for later.  Why?  Why do I do that?  I don’t want to do that. I want to burn the candles now. I want to live life. Now. Not later, not at some unknown time, but now.

This is something that is on my mind at the beginning of nearly every year. How can I laugh more this year?  How can my children and husband laugh more? How can I be a better wife and mother to them? How can we enjoy our time together more? How can we grow closer?  How can I show them faith and build my own?  How can I spend more time with my friends and cultivate those relationships more? How can I bond more with my family? How can I change all of these things in the upcoming year? How can I live life to the fullest this year?  I don’t have the answers.  All I have is my willingness to keep trying.

New Year, New You?

Happy 2015.  It's a brand new year.  Okay, the calendar may say 2015, but let's face it, everything is the same.  I, along with most people, get the sense of being able to start anew, a fresh new year to  begin again.  In truth, I'm not beginning again.  That thing I was upset about on December 31st was still there when the clock struck midnight.  Nothing changed.  The only things that really happen when midnight hits is we will continue to write 2014 for the first 3 months of the year and we will feel like we have just been given a new timeline to accomplish the things we have not accomplished prior to now.  For example, we can now say, by the end of this year, I will lose x-number of pounds, I will do x-hours of charity work or give a charity x-amount of money. All by the end of the year, all by that timeline we now feel we have. I am not going to say I've imposed this "timeline" on myself, but it seems as good as any. In reality, my timeline is 'as soon as possible.'  

The one thing that does happen for me with the changing of the year is that it forces me to reflect on the last year. Was I as kind as I wanted to be? Did I help to create some more good memories for my children? Did I better myself as a person? I can honestly say that this last year I did make more strides toward all of that than I ever have before, BUT I'm still not where I'd hoped to be.  I know I will always be a work in progress, I know I can never be finished, but I had hoped to be a bit better.  I did learn quite a bit in the last year though, which hasn't happened in quite some time. This Christmas, as I was opening gifts, gifts I had personally asked for, I was not excited.  I was just not feeling it.  I was disappointed that there wasn't more family time, I was disappointed that life got so busy that we missed our annual tradition of watching The Polar Express. I was disappointed that we weren't curled up on a couch together watching some cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie or sitting in our church service listening to 3000 people sing Silent Night.  I was disappointed about the lack of intimacy and warmth rather than what gifts I did or didn't receive. That feeling of dissatisfaction and emptiness has been culminating for several years, but it was particularly strong this year. 

That being said, is it a New Year?  Yes.  Are things different because it's a new year?  Nope.  But they will be.  I want to use this time to reconnect to the people I care about and continue working on myself and my faith and my marriage. Always a work in progress.