Be Kind To Yourself

Do you make resolutions? New Years or otherwise? How do you feel about them? Do you find yourself let down at the end of the year when you don't achieve your goals? Or does your list make you work harder to accomplish things? Do goals set your direction for the next year or do you drift along waiting for fate to find you?

I'm a believer in goals. But I've never been a writer of  lists-- mostly because I inevitably lose them, and then I feel like an idiot for doing it. I keep my lists in my head. (Although, I confess, that is a less and less efficient system considering C.R.S has set in. (Can't Remember, uh, Stuff.) Or maybe it's system overload. "The hard drive is temporarily inaccessible." Whatever the reason, lists are starting to be more appealing. And according to Oprah and the other 'experts' out there,  the very act of writing a goal down imprints it into your psyche or shoots the request out into the Universe to be fulfilled by the Wish Gremlins and... yeah, never mind...

Maybe it's too early to begin thinking about  goals for next year, but today, it occurred to me that (thankfully!) 2009 is wrapping up.  And just as I began to feel depressed about the time wasted this year, the things left undone,  I began looking back over the year I realized that I actually accomplished a lot this year.  I:

•  graduated from Grad School
• rewrote my screenplay 4,391 times. (okay I may be exaggerating that a bit. It just feels like that.)
• published another book
• welcomed a grandson into the world (while that was a deam of mine, my darling daughter did all the work on that one...)
• learned to Skype.

• survived the horrid economy (Yeah,...that would be me on the right.  Should've seen that one coming...)
• got a full time (office) job for the first time in 30 years.
• and have managed to survive 3 months of crazy law office stress.
• realized that everything (including this job) comes for a reason and I'm learning a lot.

       I guess we all tend to be hard on ourselves this time of year when things haven't gone as planned. But making this list of accomplishments made me feel better than looking at the things I'd left undone. And it gave me a starting point for my next year's list.

Oh, there will be things on that one, too, that will go undone. But next year, I'm gonna write another list of the great things that happened and not beat myself up too much for the other stuff. 

Hope you all have a wonderful, blessed Holiday, however you celebrate it,  and I wish you all bright 2010 with lists of dreams realized.