Preparing For the New Year

[KTMom91]

And things expand to fill every available spot! I can't believe we survived with three people in this tiny house! I'm not big on cleaning, would rather read, but something's got to give here!

 

[BusynMember]

I have no resolutions this year...lol. I never do.

The only thing I'd really like to make sure I do is get out to Missouri sometime. I've had so much fun with my granddaughter it's about time I get to know my grandson too. We've been Skyping. I think getting-to-know-GS is my resolution, if I have one. Nothing on our place. I'm happy with it and am doomed to always have clutter in the house. And really don't care as long as it's not dirt. Just want a safe, warm place...nothing fancy.

 

[Scent of Cedar *]

I'm happy with it and am doomed to always have clutter in the house.

If I am writing, I don't see any of it. When I am not writing (like these past years, when I have been grieving instead), there comes a time when I can feel that other way of thinking coming and I know I am preparing to fall into that place where I write. So, I have to clean everything for the time when I won't notice whether it's clean or not. I can feel that coming now. It's a kind of jittery feeling, half curiosity and half relief.

And way happy. I love that mindset. It is when I am most me. I will be falling right into it soon, I can tell.

:O)

***

New Year's resolutions this year will be that same theme of kindness toward myself. For those not with us last year, that was my only resolution for 2014.

To be kinder to myself.

And throughout the year, I would find that thought, that intention, coming into conscious awareness at the times when the negative tapes were hissing away and I would self-condemn, almost without awareness that I was doing so.

Getting dressed, putting makeup on, doing my forever frizzy hair or noting the depths of my wrinkles or bemoaning my acne scars ~ it was shocking to learn how hard I am on myself, shocking to understand that I defeat myself on so many levels before the day even begins.

I came to understand that every person I would come into contact with that day would have fought some version of that same battle. The compassion I understood for them, I extended to me.

A little grace, a little forgiveness, just a little more breath and a little less pressure.

I did not know that would happen, when I made that New Year's resolution.

But it was a delicious, and supportive and permissive resolution, and it helped me very much, in ways I could not have predicted.

It was a simple enough intention, and a general enough one, that I neither forgot nor obsessed over it.

So, kindness to ourselves, gentleness and forgiveness and that ability to choose peace when the option presents itself, or to pause for a breath to look up at the stars or take that few minutes to be there while the sun comes up and the sky brightens ~ those things are all choices I was never allowing myself time for, when we all were so hurt by the things happening to the kids.

A sort of punishment I did not know I had imposed.

Time punishment.

And that is what I learned this year, as I held that intention of kindness toward myself.

This year ~ ha! Wait until you hear! So, I have been reading Anne Lamott. If you have never read her, give yourself this gift. She is funny and real and right on about so many things having to do with life and how we live it. So, anyway. Anne Lamott describes that negative voice, those negative tapes we all carry around to torture ourselves with when we compare our insides with what other people look and say and do on their cleaned up, outside personnae, as listening to the internal radio station KFCD.

Get it?

And that imagery was so powerful and specific and simple that I am now developing a real awareness for when KFCD is playing in my head.

And my New Year's resolution this year is to listen and challenge and refute both KFCD and its sponsors. I would like to be stronger, more certain, more silent, more present. I am conscious of flattery now in a way I have not been. It bugs me when I lie, or when people lie to me. It's like my radar is tuned to super sensitive. I heard the things that weren't true before, but I believed things were better than they were, or believed they were somehow going to turn out or ~ I don't know what I believed really.

I have had to learn to see true things. It is what it is. It really is like Maya Angelou said: Believe who people tell you they are the first time.

It doesn't mean they are good or bad. It doesn't mean you have to help or change or explain anything to them or explain them to yourself.

Believe them.

I must be developing integrity or something. Maybe, internal locus of control, from everything we've shared, here on the site.

When they tell you who they are, believe them the first time.

So that's my resolution.

To confront and address KFCD and its sponsors.

:O)

Cedar

 

[pasajes4]

I am purging ALL of the junk in my life. This includes thoughts, damaging beliefs, and people who pollute my life with their negative garbage.

 

[recoveringenabler]

I'm with you Pasajes. The Big Purge. YES!