A New Year, Another Chance

The bus that I take to work each morning passes by a church that always has the best quotes on its outdoor message board. This week, the sign read: A New Year, Another Chance To Get It Right.

I LOVE that.

It's such an optimistic way of approaching the next 365 days and it applies to so many areas of my life. I am a hardcore resolutions girl - I make them every year, I break them every year, then I make them all over again the following year vowing to do better. This year, for the first time in probably forever, I didn't sit down and make a detailed list of goals to accomplish ... partly because I was traveling home from Hawaii and was jet-lagged and distracted but mostly because, really, all the goals and resolutions I've ever set in my life boil down to the same thing: I just want to get it right.

This year, I'm approaching the whole resolutions thing with more grace and flexibility than I have in years past. The focus is going to be on consciously taking steps in the right direction, rather than checking off a specific goal from my life's never ending to-do list. One step at a time is my new mantra, and taking baby steps in the right direction is my aim for 2013. For me, "getting it right" means making healthier food choices, exercising more, being more patient (with others + with myself) and writing more. I was born with a writer's heart ... this incessant need to dream on paper ... but somewhere along the way I lost touch of that. It's time to start dreaming again, and I'm hoping this blog will be a tool for me to do that.

This isn't my first attempt at blogging. I kept a diary from the age of eleven to the age of seventeen, and began writing a blog (which, really, is just an electronic diary) about five years ago. It started out as a craft blog where I posted photos of all my creative endeavors; then it slowly evolved into a whatever-I-feel-like-writing-about-today kind of blog. I never had many readers and most of my posts had no comments or feedback, but I didn't care because I was writing for myself. Unfortunately, I stumbled into a bad case of writers' block and the number of days between blog posts became longer and longer until eventually I wasn't really writing anything at all. I closed the blog and, months later, started a new food/cooking blog that never really took off ... probably because I'm actually not a very good cook and much prefer EATING food than I do WRITING about it. So, long story short, I closed the door on blogging and went on my merry way.

I didn't think about blogging again until a few weeks ago when I re-read some of my old blog entries. I have such detailed reflections on my time in university, the decision making process that eventually lead me to move out west, my first few months living in my new city. That season of my life is documented with sincere entries that I poured my heart into writing and re-reading those posts took me back to a time and place I'd already forgotten. But then it just stops. Entries about my courtship with my now-husband are few and far between. Posts about our engagement and wedding planning are virtually non-existent. Our honeymoon? Our first-month anniversary? Our first big fight as a newlywed couple? Nope, no posts on any of that. There's just silence ...

That realization made me incredibly sad. The rest of the world wide web might not care where my husband and I went on our first few dates or what I ate or what I wore ... but I care. I might be the only one interested in how we adjusted to living together as newlyweds, but shouldn't I be writing about the things that I care about? Isn't that the whole point? I don't want our newlywed life to go undocumented. I want my future pregnancies to be recorded with more than a monthly bump photo. I want there to be a written history of our family as it grows and blossoms into something precious; I want our adventures and trials to be forever preserved. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now I want to be able to re-read the things I wrote and smile at how far we've all come.

So, that's the goal. I openly admit that at times this blog will be completely presumptuous and self-absorbed. If you choose to read along, you can expect lots of self pep talks and "woe is me, the sky is falling" and lots of photos taken with my camera's ten-second timer and TONS of grammatical errors. But you can also expect honesty and open sharing. Promise. Pinky swear.

Hopefully 2013 will be the year that I finally "get it right" as a blogger. One step, one blog entry at a time.