Making a List, Checking It Twice

Mike and I are both on a stay-cation. I have off, since the college is closed, and he is on his last vacation of the year. We have so many things going on we didn't even consider leaving town. I suppose we could have gone somewhere for over night, but even the effort to do that seemed like a bit much, so here we are. Don't get me wrong, I am perfectly fine with staying home. Christmas is over and now it's time to kick back and relax. I have enough leftovers in the fridge I am not required to cook for at least the next four days and my laundry is done.
Since getting my day job, I missed out on any opportunity to go on vacation. We have to schedule our vacation time a year in advance and it was scheduled for the fall when I was required to be at work. I won't lie, I was less than thrilled at missing the entire year's worth of vacation, but I love my new job and felt guilty for even entertaining the idea of complaining. Next year...we are Clevelanders so we utter that phrase without even thinking.
This is the week I start my New Year's resolutions. For all the bitter and cynical people who hate those, well, you are excused. I, personally love them, the idea that I get to come up with any new hopes and dreams for myself to further my life's work, my quest for becoming a better human being. Being fatally flawed, I have some real work to do, and this is my way of planning for it. I start making an insane list of things I want to accomplish, habits I need to change or acquire, and at least five new things to try. Why five new things? I don't know, I suppose it seems more "do-able" than seven and more ambitious than three, so five it is, a perfect little number for me to try and conquer.
I keep my lists from year to year to see in December what I may or may not have accomplished. I did pretty well this past year. I changed some things, being more tolerant when needed and less tolerant to those who brought the bad juju around me. I kept friends who deserved to be a part of my family and gently released those with love, who needed to go. I got new jobs, auditioned and performed, made new friends, and made some very necessary and mandatory changes with my health. I am about at 80% so far and the year is not over...yet. I still have a few days to cram some things in if I really want to. Last year's list seemed insurmountable. I wrote it all down and then looked at it again realizing just how tall of an order I had produced. Last January, after the list was complete I felt almost depressed by all I had put on paper. My first initial thought was, "This is nuts! There is no way I will even come close to this!" But I did, partly because I wrote it down and mostly because I worked my ass off trying to accomplish the list. That's the thing about resolutions, they won't magically happen, they have to be tended to and worked on. Remember the book "The Secret"? I read it, and what I got from it was this: It is important to visualize your goals, to be able to see them in three dimensions. It is important to put things out in the universe that you want. And lastly, the most important part of the strategy is to work toward your goals and DO SOMETHING!
Being a praying kind of girl, I love it when certain folks tell me to hand it over to God. No worries, I got that, but I am not the kind of girl who then sits on my laurels and does nothing expecting Him to fix my life. I am capable of helping out. Whether you believe in God or the universe, the most important thing I think we can do is get out of our own way and allow things to happen around us while we are working toward our goals. I am a part-time control freak. I say part-time because my kids are adults and my need to know everything, be a part of everything, hear everything, well those days are gratefully, OVER. Now I am a control freak about my pets and our house. It allows me to feel like I have some control or power over anything, but limits me to things and animals who take no offense. It's what is referred to as a win/win situation. I know I still get in my own way, thinking negatively when I do not have even an inkling of an answer, or seeing the potential wrong before anything has happened. Knowing this, I will have to relinquish my bad habit the newly formed list of resolutions and make an active attempt to cut it out. Once I know better I have to try and do better. While making my list of things I need to catch and release, there have been things that have come up over the years as new discoveries for me. It's usually something banal that I do that needs to go. Like, saying "like" too often when speaking making myself sound like a twelve year old, as if. It's usually something like that, something my family is very aware of, but I am hearing for the time. One year I became acutely aware of every time I said, "Huh?" It was the year I was writing the book and working long hours at the computer. People would walk over to me and just start talking without asking if I were available. "Huh?" I would look at them as if they had three heads. That December, I put "huh" on the list of things that needed to go.
This year I have a couple of repeat offenders that I still have not removed from my repertoire. I have still a few other things that I have not accomplished from before, so they too will make an encore to this new list. I am not 100% sure of what all else will be on it. I think this year is going to be a big one. We still do not know if we are moving north, we certainly do not know where the kids will end up and there are adventures for Mike and myself to have, so the list will morph into the direction of where we are or where we are headed. The uncertainty can and sometimes does make me nuts, but that is what I said about last year's list and things turned out pretty well.