A New Year (1/9/2009)

I'm going to ask you to bear with me on this entry. Although this blog is dedicated to what it means to be a city girl moved to the farm, I'm going to focus for just this one entry on just being me.

This time of year always inspires deep desires for time management. Perhaps that is part of the harried city life I lived. Where every moment in my job was accounted for in fifteen minute increments and only deemed worthy if it produced money for the company I worked for. It sounds bad but I did get paid for it, and paid well.

But the case of time management frenzy I get this time of year goes a little deeper than that. As does the desire for setting goals for the new year.

Interestingly, when I think of goals in January I think most about my writing goals. Household goals, farm goals, and even sadly, spiritual goals all slide to the back burner, or in the country, are piled somewhere behind the barn.

This happens mostly because with the coming of a new year there is the marking off of yet another birthday within the same week. Birthdays, especially those within the higher number ranges, always bring reality.

Although I do not feel it in my heart, time is ticking away in my body and my mind. I am growing older and with growing age comes a growing fear that I might not accomplish in my life what I believe I was born to accomplish.

In order to push that fear aside I turn to organization and time management. Believing in the power of these things to bring about amazing results. My fingers fairly itch to pull out a fresh new daytimer and to fill in all the empty lines with precise plans on how, this year, I will finally achieve something important.

There is only one good thing about this compulsion. For a moment when I am setting goals, I am not looking back in my life, I am avidly focused on looking forward. Outside of that, all my carefully written plans are a futile effort.

Within a week all the rigid walls confining the minutes of my days, carefully written in clear pencil (with the 0.5 mm lead), give way to the terrible reality of my predictable humanity. I ignore them and I live. One day at a time. Whatever is given to me each day. Life happens.

I guess this means that I am not meant to be a powerful woman who sets aside life's twists and turns and, more troubling, its commoness, to live a life of precise, single-vision achievement.

This January however, I know that however glorious a life of achievment appears each January, it is just a mirage. One I imagine up to chase away the panic of growing too old to achieve anything useful.

So, I won't do that this year. I was ready to. I had my pencil out and full of lead, I had a notebook to record all my wonderful goals. I was going to map out the incredible steps I would take this year down the path of achievement and, lets face it, the all desireable glory.

Instead, at 53, I'm going to simplify things. I'm going to redefine achievement. I'm going to rejoice in some already achieved achievements. Because now that I've slowed down and begun to reorganize my thinking, I've noticed these really cool achievements lurking on the fringes of my yearly panic. They are:

1. I am loved eternally

2. I love eternally

These achievements are irreversible and they are, simply stated, enough.

Especially for a life that was given for years to the despairing belief that this would never happen. But it did. Miraculously so. And it stands as a testimony that sometimes despite our lack of detailed day planners, the overwhelming busyness of life, and our boring commonness, we have achieved a great deal more than we give ourselves credit for.

Furthermore, I am determined to believe that without having achieved these two things first, accomplishing anything else would be meaningless, if not impossible.

So in view of this and without one pencil mark of planning, 2009 is going to be a good year.

I believe that 53 is going to be incredible and not too old to be even more incredible.

And that what is yet to come is a bonus when added to what has already been achieved.