Fresh Start (for Write on Wednesday)

So, I'm back.  Home from my lovely, idyllic time in Florida, languishing around in the sunshine, taking long walks, reading, lolling about in my comfy clothes..

Ah, how sweet it is it was.

But now back to reality, to cold midwestern mornings and chores and work and responsibility.

Deep breath.

It's the New Year, and though I don't make resolutions, I do like to make Fresh Starts.  There is a difference, you know.  Fresh Starts are much more forgiving and flexible than resolutions.  Fresh Starts allow you to forget the past and start over right from where you are this minute.  Fresh Starts can happen every day of the week if you want them to.

Here are some of the things I'm Starting Fresh this 2010:

• Slowing down the pace of my life.  I try to do this all the time, and somehow always fail miserably.  This time, I'm thinking more about my attitude than my actual physical life and activity.  Allowing myself the freedom to let things go, to stop and take a cleansing breath now and again;
• Focusing.  My life feels really scattered an unfocused sometimes, which I think contributes to my sense of being in a huge hurry.  I've identified several reasons for this, one of which I plan to write about in more depth later on, because I think it's something all of us are dealing with.   I need to plan my activity, organize my priorities, and stick to one task until it's finished;
• Doing what I love.  Certainly spending more time with my family and friends is at the top of this list.   Avocationally, music and writing.  Vocationally, making sure I'm using my strengths at work effectively.

So, off I go, into a new year, a new decade, with all its new beginnings. 

 How about you?  Do you have a Fresh Start in mind? 

Write on Wednesday is making a Fresh Start...check it out.

Fresh Start

Best thing about a New Year?  The feeling of starting over, being offered a clean slate to begin new projects, or even to revisit past projects and give them a new twist.

So let's Write on Wednesday once again.  But with a bit of a twist this time 'round.

Come here each Wednesday for a new writing prompt, some words or ideas to get your writing muscles working and over that mid-week hump. 

The idea is to write something ~ prose, poem, fiction, essays, lists, anything wordy that strikes your fancy ~ post it on your blog, and leave a comment here with a link to your post.  That way others can come visit you and say hello.

If you don't blog, perhaps you'd rather write in your journal, or even on a paper napkin in Starbucks. 

The idea is, of course, just to Write.  Hopefully everyday.  But especially on Wednesday.

Today, the words of course are:

Fresh Start

New Year

I love new things - shiny, bright, never before used things.  I love new books, that crackle when you peel back the cover and release their pungent aroma of fresh ink.  I love new cars, with sparkly paint and crystal clean whindshields.  I love new furniture all regal, smooth, and firm.  So you would think that I would love new years, with their 365 empty days waiting expectantly to be filled with activity and emotion - work, play, love, life, happiness, sadness.  And I do love the idea of a new year, with all the hope and promise implicit in the words.   But I'm also just a titch anxious every new year's too, because despite all the planning and resolving we do in the days leading up to this fresh start so nicely provided by our calendars, there's that rather scary element of unknowing that comes along with it.  

My anxiety level is a bit higher than normal this year condsidering all the unexpected things that happened during 2009.   But each morning we awake never knowing what the day will bring, and I'm determined not to allow last year's series of disasters to color my thinking about the new year in front of me, or, for that matter, about life in general and my own in particular.  Though the events of 2009 - my aunt and uncle's death, my husband's job loss - have inevitably altered my life, those changes have not been totally devastating or entirely negative.  Like  Janus, the Roman god for whom this month is named, I'm now able to look back and forward at the same time, having not only survived, but having learned a thing or two in the process.

One of my Facebook friends posted a question in her status update yesterday.  "What would it take for you to live simply and contentedly in 2010?" she queried.   I found it interesting that she chose simplicity and contentment as her goals for the year, and, in asking that question, assumed others would find them to be worthy desires of their own hearts.  For a long time, I've felt a yearning for simplicity, which for me would mean less busyness in my life.  Realistically, looking at the things that cause me to feel rushed and overburdened, I admit that many of them are of my own choosing...music and traveling and dogs and writing and blogging...but these are the things that mean putting stars and hearts on my calendar pages, and I'm not inclined to sacrifice them for the black squiggles  which crowd the majority of my days.

One of the things I've learned during the course of these past months is that true contentment comes from the most simple things.  Sitting on the porch with my husband and the dogs, watching the sun set behind the evergreen trees.  Walking around the lakes here on a perfect sunny morning while the egrets tiptoe along the shoreline beside me. Reading a good book with a cup of hot, fresh coffee at hand. Sitting around the dinner table with my family, sharing food, ideas, and memories.

So if I were to set a goal for this shiny new year, it would be to fill my blank calendar pages with more of those moments, and to savor them when they occur.  Those are the moments that shore us up despite the inevitable hurts and disappointments, that heal our hearts when sorrow steals in.   The moments that fend off the fear and anxiety of the unknown, and give us the strength to move forward with grace and hope.

How about you?  What would it take for you to live simply and contentedly in 2010?

Aftermath

Amazing, isn't it~ another Christmas, come and gone.  I must admit, I'm always a bit relieved when all the hoopla is over, particularly all the advertising and inane Christmas music.  Really, sometimes I think if I hear Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer one more time I'll commit hari kari. The days leading up to Christmas were chock full, and I felt as if I were in the midst of a week long stress test - you know the kind where they have you walking on the treadmill and someone keeps ramping up the speed and the incline so that before long you're huffing and puffing for all you're worth while your heart pounds frantically in your chest.

Yes, that was my last week exactly.

Then came Christmas Eve, and a surprise invitation to have dinner with my cousin-in-law and her family.  So we did that- Jim, I, and my mother -three only children suddenly thrust into the midst of a large family Christmas, complete with toddlers running pantless through the dining room and large dogs escaping with muzzles full of ham.

Fun.  Really it was~ I'm not being sarcastic.  Spending time with a large family reminds me just how accustomed to the quiet, reclusive life I've  we've become.  There's nothing wrong with small families, but life as an only child is definitely lived on a much smaller, less dramatic scale.  There are fewer people to be annoyed with, for one thing, fewer personalities with which to clash, fewer grudges to bear.  

But sometimes, and most especially at holidays I think, this very tiny family of ours seems rather forlorn.  When my cousin-in-law extended the invitatation, I think she was dumbfounded at the thought of a Christmas celebration consisting of three people gathered round the kitchen table.   Sometimes I do feel a bit of a lost soul at the holidays.  And it doesn't help that  every year our little group seems to diminish in size.  So it was good to be included in their boisterous happy family - made me feel a bit like Tiny Tim, actually.

In the aftermath of that dinner, we hurried off to church for the 10:00 candlelight communion service.  It's one of my favorite church services of the year, nothwithstanding that I'm up and down like a jack-in-the box between the handbell tables and the choir loft.   There is a calm that descends in the moment when the lights go off and we make our way out of the choir loft, lit candles in hand, to stand round the circumference of the church and sing Silent Night.  It's a moment out of time, as if the world has stopped spinning on its crazy 21st century axis, and we've all been transported 100 years backwards, when life was simple and there were no beeping cell phones, no upside down mortgages, no terrorists with bombs in their underwear.

That Christmas Eve service is steeped in tradition, and perhaps that's what  I love most about it.  Not only is the service itself part of a long tradition in the Christian church, but attending this particular one at this particular church is the one tradition my family has maintained for the past 14 years.   Our holidays seem so fluid these days - every year, the celebration takes a little bit different shape depending on travel plans and work schedules and musical performances.  But the Christmas Eve service - well, that's a given.  We're quite firmly rooted to being in that church on December 24, at 10:00 p.m.  Though I'm always really tired by that time of day, the music, the crush of warm bodies, the red sea of poinsettia's adorning the chancel -it's all a tonic for my world-weary soul.

Ah me, if only it could last.

But there is always an aftermath - for the past three days we've been traveling by car to our second home  here in Naples.  It really is a second home, for this is where the rest of our little family resides...our son and daughter in law, as well as my father and his wife. 

And so we have another celebration of sorts, in the aftermath of this Christmas just passed. 

How about you?  What is the aftermath of your Christmas?

Trying My Patience

It's been a week to try women's souls...nothing cataclysmic, thank the gods, but a preponderance of  disturbances and upsets that seemed quite determined to eradicate all those fine feelings of comfort and joy I was boasting about so happily a while back. Too much work, for a start, at a time when I really wasn't all that much of a mind to work at all.  And changes at work, to boot - changes that I don't really cotton to all that well.   People are asking me to work in ways contradictory to my personality.  I feel like I know myself pretty well after almost 54 years of rather intensive study.  I know how I work best, understand what it is I need to make my work life productive and satisfying.  I think I've always known it, actually, going way back to the time when I dropped my plans to be a teacher, and my father asked me what I thought I'd like to do instead.

"I'm not really sure," I admitted.  "But I think I'd like  to have my own little office where I work around nice people, but be able to do my own work all by myself," I replied, inwardly shuddering at the memory of my practice teaching where I'd been surrounded by clamor and confusion and the demands of two dozen six year olds.

I've also learned that I don't like being the main attraction, don't enjoy being "in charge" of anyone other than myself.  That's why I love being an accompanist so much - I'm just slightly in the background- necessary and valuable, but not the star of the show, collaboratively following someone else's direction. 

No one in my life has ever tried to change me, and for that I'm grateful.  My parents always accepted my personality, and my husband has continued to honor all the traits which have become very deeply engrained in my half century on earth.  My truest friends loved me the way I am otherwise we don't stay friends for long.  You see, I'm pretty easy to get along with unless you try to make me into something I'm not.  And then, as my mother says, I get my Irish up. 

Last week, that's exactly what my boss did.  You see, she wants to change my job so that it becomes purely administrative.  She wants to hire other people to do the work I'm currently doing, and have me be the "gatekeeper," corralling all their work, editing it, organizing it, and distributing it.  She wants to put me in charge, have me be the manager, pull me out of my nice little corner cubicle and put me at the center of an array of workers all funneling their work to me.  Just like all those little six years olds back in my practice teaching days, vying for my attention.

"But you know I don't work well that way," I protested.  "I really prefer working independently, I'm much more productive that way, and a lot less stressed."

"You need to get over that," she says, in the way she has of thinking she knows what's best for everyone. 

Now, when people tell me I "need" to do something, I start to feel a distinct prickle at the back of my neck.  The hackles start to rise and I go into defensive mode.  Although I like to be a follower in my professional life, I'm extremely independent when it comes to matters of my personality and behavior.  Nobody tells me what I "need" to do or be. 

No Body.

"You certainly have a perfect right to decide how you want to run your business and this department," I told her, crossing my arms over my chest in classic closed mind posture.  "But I have the right to decide how I want to work and I don't want to work that way."

She was actually speechless for about three seconds (a miracle really).

"Do you mean you'd leave?"

"I might," I answered.  "I've been through a lot this past year, and I know that life is too short to be in a situation where I'm constantly unhappy.  I don't have to do that, and I won't."

I don't know whether I'll have to make that decision or not, whether she'll come up with an alternative plan we both can life with.  I've wondered lately whether I might have reached my shelf life with this particular job, whether it's time to move on to something else.  There had been niggling thoughts about this in the back of mind last spring, before all the calamities of the summer hit. 

But change is hard for me - that's another personality trait of mine with which I'm very familiar.  I'll put up with a lot before I willingly make drastic life changes.

I guess I'll try to be patient a while longer and see.

How about you?  Do you feel you know yourself pretty well? Are you satisfied with your personality?  Is your current lifestyle and work in harmony with your personality?  How do you handle it when people try to change you, or put you in a position where you know you'll be uncomfortable/unhappy?