Thoughts on the New Year

Thank you so much for your support on my photo-junk meltdown last week.  I love you guys--I wished you lived here and could be my PTA-backup.  Also, I want you to know that all the typos in the first letter are due to my retyping it at 1 a.m. (I hadn't saved the original file).  I did not send in that mess.

As I started thinking about New Year's Resolutions this weekend, the first thing that came to mind was, "don't do anything I don't want to do."  I was at first a little shocked by my own selfishness when contemplating that for a resolution.  Then I thought, well, why not?  Why not examine my motives when doing something, to see if I am doing it because it brings me joy or pleasure or some other type of personal satisfaction, or if I'm just doing it out of a sense of obligation or guilt?  And then determine if there is a way to approach things with a different attitude, or just not do them if I really don't want to?  I've already failed on this one, by going along to my mother-in-law's house on New Year's Day.  We went sledding on the big hill, which was a lot of fun (though the climb back up is exhausting!) and I'm glad I did it, but then I had to sit around dying of boredom while she and C practiced their music.

Other things I want to do in the next year are to continue with my efforts of simplification and organization.  I think both of these go along with my first resolution--eliminate unwanted things from my life, from clutter to excess activities to guilt.

Last year, for the first time, I had work that I found enjoyable, satisfying and meaningful.  With the changed political climate in this state, I anticipate that this will change for the worse (and possibly undo all the work I did last year).  It kind of depresses me that in all my adult life I will have had only one year of meaningful work (and that that may prove to have been a joke).  I kind of blame college; in their quest to fatten their coffers with starving students' loan dollars, they trick you into thinking that with their degree, you will go forth and make a difference in the world.  If only they had been honest, I could be a plumber or something today.

Anyway, with the prospects of my professional life being less than satisfying for the foreseeable future, I feel like I should focus on increasing the satisfaction level in my personal life--that means more, you guessed it, writing!  Also I'd like to take an art class--drawing or painting, and improve my skills with my point-and-shoot camera.  (Why is it that all of my interests and hobbies are those of a retired person?  This is not new--when C and I first moved to Maine, before kids, I used to take adult ed classes and inevitably I was easily 30 years younger than anyone else in the class).

So those are my somewhat vague and abstract goals for the new year:
*approach life with joy and desire (rather than duty and guilt);
*get organized;
*simplify;
*eliminate unwanted things from my life;
*write, write, write;
*learn to draw and/or paint and take pictures.

What are your plans and goals for 2011?