The next step…

 In a way, I suppose that just writing this second entry is taking the next step for me. 

Right now there are so many things in motion; things that could easily distract me from writing my thoughts here and I probably wouldn’t notice in the least until a long time had passed.  But I don’t want that to happen… again… it’s too easy to fall out of habit, and there is simply too much in my head to not have an outlet like this to pour out my thoughts and feelings.  I know that I can continually pledge and promise that I won’t let it happen again, but the only true way to avoid the pitfall is to keep writing.  Perhaps, even those times when there may not be very much to write.

Today, there is plenty to write about, though…  Even though it is summer, which tends to be a "down" time at work, there are so many things going on outside of work.  Social opportunities, special events and festivals that I want to go to, and many personal projects that can get some well deserved attention in the absence of other things.  Today, in particular, is a good time to look back at the year previous, as June 29th for me rings in another Birthday… 

Now, birthdays have never been a particularly important aspect of me when I was growing up.  Being at the end of June, it always fell about a week or so after school had let out, and invariably, that was always the time that people chose to take family vacations.  Even if I had wanted a birthday party, there probably wouldn’t have been more than one or two friends in town, so these celebrations from very early on were always confined to being just a family affair.  Living far away from both sets of grandparents also kept things small in scale.  Sure, I would get cards from relatives, but it wasn’t terribly often that I would see them.  And so I learned to not expect much from others when it came to my birthday "celebration".

In the years beyond adolescence, I’ve become much more self-reliant on generating meaning and significance out of my birthday.  Some cultures don’t even acknowledge such a celebration, and I can understand why – a birthday is no different than any other day in our life, so why should it be treated as such?  Conversely, why shouldn’t every day of ones life be as fully-lived as ones birthday?  There are some interesting themes out there, and hopefully I’ll get to spend some time thinking about them in the days and weeks ahead.

Some questions that I have wanted to ponder in looking back over the past year:

1) What accomplishment am I most proud of over the past year?

I had to think awhile about this one, because I wanted to pick something that wasn’t anything that I had done before, and yet was something that had a profound impact on myself and others.  The older you get, the more routinized you can become, and it can be a challenge to break out of that daily schedule to do new and innovative things.  That being said, I think the accomplishment that stands out the most was my volunteer work in coordinating the photography for a national conference of 2000 attendees that lasted for a week.  Before this convention, such a position had not existed, and so it required planning everything up from square one, because there were no notes to go off of.  To make things more interesting, there was no budget to make this happen, so it would all have to be done with volunteer time and loaned equipment.  I also needed to attend 6 meetings in the months leading up to the convention that required me to take Fridays off from work to drive the 500 miles to get there, Meetings all day Saturday, and then the 500 mile return trip on Sunday.  I definitely invested myself in the effort, and I think that because of that, when we actually got to the convention, even though my whole week was consumed by my responsibilities as coordinator, things went about as well as they possibly could have, and because of that I am proud of what I accomplished.  (That’s saying a lot for me, because I am not a man of self-pride.  I would prefer to have the spotlight on someone else…)

2) What area am I still struggling greatly in?

The perrennial answer to this in general, is "taking care of myself".  I seem to have this knack for taking care of others, and going very much above and beyond in making sure the most minute details are accounted for and that people constantly feel welcome, comfortable, and at ease.  Many times, I do not even consider myself while expending all this time and energy on others.  As I get older, I realize that by neglecting myself and my own needs, it prevents me from being as good a steward to others as I am capable of being.  Be it getting enough excercise, eating right, getting enough sleep, or making regular doctors appointments, there seems to be a mental block that always stops me before I can make an effort to help myself.  It’s almost as if my selfless nature fills me with guilt over taking time for myself when there are others that are more in need than myself, even if my need is great.  Well… it is starting to catch up with me.  Not so much the age, but the compound effects of not taking care of myself.  I think that this year there will need to be a more structured plan to do something about this, and enlist the help of others, since I’ve struggled for so long on my own trying to do this on my own…

3) What am I&nbsp

;doing now that I would not imagined myself doing a year ago?

Dieting.  I know it sounds silly, but a year ago, I had pretty much thrown in the towel on doing anything to lower that number on the scale.  I don’t know how I thought that this would help anything, but for some reason, I thought that if I didn’t fixate on trying to lose weight that I wouldn’t stress out about it, and therefore it would be easier.  However, the continual access to food, and the lack of a secondary presenece in my daily life to remind me of when to stop more than made up for the lack of stress, especially when it came to raising that three-digit number.  About a month ago, I got back on the wagon.  None of the diet programs that they market (ie – books, weight watchers, Atkins, etc) have ever worked for me… so I developed my own balanced diet, and while it is very repetitive in terms of the food choices, I’ve stuck to it for nearly a month, and I am going in the right direction.  It will be tough to make the transition once someone else does the cooking for me come August, but hopefully I will have built up the will power to resist the urge to forget the consquences of eating too much…  so I’ll probably have more journalling to do about that when we get on to that month…

4) What do I want to do in the upcoming year that I have the power to start doing right now?

I want to be more passionate in the upcoming year, and I think that recently, I have started to have the confiedence to make this actually happen.  Most people would say that I am rather soft-spoken and that I don’t have much to say when I’m talking.  I’ve always felt that my mind worked in such a way that I was always better at typing my thoughts than expressing them verbaly (in real time).  I suppose that the little bit of extra time it would take to think of the exact words I would want to use would wind up taking longer than the normal pause in conversation, the result of which would be a m issed opportunity.  More often than not, the things that I wanted to say would be left unsaid, and the conversation would continue, without those things being a part of it.  Well, I think it’s time for a change.  Even if the words don’t come out exactly right, I think that I’ve missed saying far too many things, and the time for expressing myself is now.  There are so many things that I want to say to so many people… and in the past, if I didn’t get to say something, I would often forget it, and that thought would be lost.  Not any more.  I am going to find ways of being more assertive, and more vocally present in conversations that in the past I would have been a mere observer.  In personal conversations, I am going to be more open, and perhaps a little less guarded in what I say, because I do feel that I temper the things I would share with others, and in doing so I rob them of my true thoughts and feelings, which is precisely what they are asking from me, only I haven’t been giving it to them this whole time.

Bring on the next year!  I’m ready to give it a go…