New year = new resolutions = new goals = new beginnings. These thoughts are on many of our minds each December as we head toward a new year. I know several people who say they don’t set resolutions because they never last. Some people would say this is due to a lack of willpower, dedication, or motivation. Others would say that it’s because you made the resolution, but didn’t have a solid plan to execute it. I think all of this is true. But…it doesn’t necessarily stop us from stepping into January feeling like something new is starting and wanting to make changes or improvements for ourselves.
Last year, inspired by Ruth Soukup and her Living Well Planner and Goal Crushing System, I decided to set a theme for the year. This theme would help push me toward the goals I was setting for myself and keep me on track. I also chose a Word of the Year. I love using stickers in my planner so I would choose stickers each month and week that somewhat related to my yearly theme. As the year wore on, however, I felt like I was failing my theme…and I really don’t like the word “failure.” I wasn’t making any progress on my goals, as in, I wasn’t even working on them. I was very frustrated that I wasn’t living up to the theme. I wasn’t honoring it or my Word of the Year. It took me until the end of December to see that maybe the theme actually did guide me through the year, but it just wasn’t in the way I had envisioned it. I never gave up on those big goals. They are still my goals for this year, and I am still going to try to reach them. That theme pushed me and kept me going as 2020 fell apart around me.
So what was that theme? What was that word? My 2020 theme was “Relentless Forward Progress.” This is a term from ultrarunning that can be a mantra when things get really hard. My word for the year was “Persistence.” This is a word that I use when I am getting really sore and tired on a long run to remind me to keep going. At the end of December, as I looked back on the year and set up my new planner for 2021 (a return to The Happy Planner…more on that in another post), I realized that God had a plan, a course for me to follow, and that while my plans didn’t materialize as I had hoped, when I laid those plans out, I had no idea what was about to happen just three months later.
COVID hit. Schools shut down. My daughters’ friend from dance tragically passed away a week after the shut-down. They never went back to school. Dance competitions stopped. My junior didn’t have a Prom. The 5k I help put on got rescheduled and then cancelled. Our dance recital got rescheduled. Our county fair was weird. My now-senior’s best friend passed away from a long battle with pediatric osteosarcoma, and then school started. I had a senior and a freshman trying to navigate hybrid schooling, masked cheer and dance team practices, trying to return to a dance studio without their friend, and I was trying to support them as best I could. My running had taken a hit thanks to long-lasting pain in my hips and low back that I couldn’t figure out along with some runs in the summer where I got overheated. Running hurt and was hard. The presidential campaigns were exhausting. We had a COVID exposure that sent us into quarantine and halfway through it, my husband tested positive for COVID adding another week to our quarantine.
Somehow, we made it through to December. My girls got to dance and cheer at football games. My senior got to compete a self-choreographed solo at state dance team championships. Our girls volleyball won state followed by our football team winning state two weeks later. (Did I mention that at the beginning of the COVID shut-down our boys basketball team won state? No? Well, they did. And our boys baseball team got second at state over the summer. We are kind of awesome around here.) My daughter was able to have a procedure to repair the labral tear in her hip that did not involve surgery. In spite of COVID concerns, we had a good Thanksgiving and Christmas and did get to see family either as a small gathering or on Zoom.
As I sat there reflecting on my 2020 theme, I realized that I did not fail it. We made progress through all of that. I held my children up as they collapsed in grief for their friends. Literally. I rearranged schedules and washed horses at 5am for horse shows. I wiped tears and offered options and provided snacks. I swore…a lot. I made masks and put hand sanitizer in all of their bags. I broke some rules. I kept running. I Persisted. Even though I didn’t know that we were going to lose Ruth Bader Ginsberg when I selected my word, still…I persisted. I made Relentless Forward Progress. Was it the progress I thought I was going to make? No. I still wish I could have done more with those goals. I think God knew that it wasn’t going to be the right time. That my grief over all of it was going to be a lot to carry and that I needed to focus on helping my kids through all of the shit and pull myself through it as well. We made it. It wasn’t pretty. But we made it.
So that last week in December 2020, as I thought ahead toward a year filled with hope for a vaccine, for dance competitions, for Prom, for graduation and many lasts followed by many firsts as my daughter goes off to college, I chose my theme for 2021. Make Today Count.
Peace.
Julia
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