No Harm New Years Suggestions

 

 

Oh, they are a good idea, and oh so lofty and good, but the love for them peters out within the first few weeks, if not days.  Do not make a resolution to break or make a habit just because culture is suggesting you should.  Do not try to eat an elephant all at one time.  Change things in your environment that will help you achieve success.  Watch for saboteurs, even self.  Make little changes that better fit what you hope to achieve. Keep track of how it is going.  Know some things are out of your control.  Keep trying.

Is now the time, personally, for you to begin a new habit?  I tell you that I am not going for long leisurely walk when it is 23 below and blowing snow.  Not going to happen.  So, if I am putting down a walk a day, I am done already.  Be realistic. 

Be sure to break into the new habit.  Do not try to conquer the world in one day.  Don’t decide to walk a 4K marathon the day after New Years.  Learn to walk the front walk for a time and expand on it for next year’s marathon.  Anyway, I am not walking any marathon ever.  I am lucky to walk to the mail once a month. 

Look, we all know, sometimes willpower is not enough.  We are basically procrastinators and that’s why we are trying to set up some motivation in the first place.  Dieting is a favorite resolution and, if the cupboards are full of goodies, well,… first you should go through your cupboards and ditch the calorie wasters.  I have the opposite problem.  I have to eat calories but avoid sugars and starch and it is a life-threatening thing for me.  Think I can stick to it?  No…  I am having trouble eating anything, allergic to soy, hate chalky drinks, hate chocolate, cannot digest salads…   and I have to try to hit bare minimum of 700 calories a day.  I struggle every day to eat enough.  If walking is a goal, make sure you walk in places that inspire you, interest you, not ten times around the house.  Change your environment to fit your needs.

We all need cheerleaders.  There will always be saboteurs.  People do not like to see us change.  If we change, they have to change to meet our changes.  We never have to defend ourselves, nor even tell that we have set a goal or intention.  If change is noticed, you only need to tell the minimum.  If others are uncomfortable, that is their choice.  You need people who will support you whole-heartedly and those true and faithful are the ones to choose to tell.

Don’t be too rigid about what you hope to achieve.  If you fail, give yourself credit for the time you made it and start again to make it even longer.  Life has its way of getting in the way.  You can even try setting the goal for a few days at a time just to see ow well it works for you.  This will also give you an idea how to modify the goal so it fit better in your life.  It should not be hard hard work.  There should feel like joy in any accomplishment made.

You can keep track of your achievement.  An unlabeled graph can sit in a place of your own notice so that you can see change.  You can use post-it-notes on your bathroom mirror so you see a reminder first thing in the morning.  For instance, I choose a word of something I want to work on and a note on the mirror reminds me. I write the word on my dry board and in my day planner. 

And there will be days…days when you absolutely cannot do it, cannot fake it, and cannot make it.  Life is going to get in the way.  Make sure it is not your Ego trying to sabotage you, though.   It is easy to find an excuse and it is tough to find the will some days.   Changing our behavior can be discouraging.  When you hit the floor, stay there for a bit and contemplate how it happened before you jump back up, dust yourself off, and get going on it again.    

You can do anything you choose to do, in some fashion and not necessarily exactly how you envisioned it.  Happy New Year, now go choose a word that will encompass your main theme for the year to work on.  Aging takes courage, so mine is courage.  Last year taught me a whole lot about courage and this year I want to be prepared.  It is written everywhere already because I want to get one day’s head start. 

©Carol Desjarlais 12.31.23

 

Time Is Ticking

 

 

The year steadily comes to a close and there are changes happening in the physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual world.  Are we changing with it or are we chaffing against it.?  Asd time ticks, the bear reigns supreme during this segment of time of winter coming on strong and time for us to nestle nicely into it.  This is the time for us to care for self.  Amidst the jingling and shooting fireworks is the center of our soul needing us to take time for self, to nurture self, to regain a sense of rest before spring comes.  It can feel like a long wait or, for some of u time is rushing through.  What can we do to take time for self?

Women were never encouraged to take time for self, for many decades.  We were to keep busy, be a servant to our family, and be a woebegone woman full of deprived body, mind, heart and soul.  Today’s women have been given cultural permission to rest and care for self, although it still might feel foreign to some of us baby boomers.  However you find peace, comfort, and time for just YOU is really important in today’s hurry-up world.  Some of us fight our type A personalities that have to be busy busy busy.  I find my peace and self-comfort in creativity.  It fills in the gaps of “What shall I do now?”

I will often turn to Youtube or Pinterest for inspiration for creations.  Right now, I have a rhythm that I hope to continue until my rag quilt is done.  I begin my morning with arting and blogging.  Then I get breakfast, welcome in home care, and then spend another ten-square time on strips for the quilt.  Doing handwork and art is my time of mediation, reflection, where I allow no negativity to enter in.  I tidy up, vacuum, spot ,mop the floor at the door where the dogs come in and out.  While The Bee Man watches global news, I finish my blog.  Then I turn to making sure I have the ingredients out for dinner and, today, am waiting for my sour dough starter to rise so I can begin sourdough bread, a’la Bonnie and Grace.

Then, after laundry and a quick swifter of living room, I have my shower and dude it up.  I weigh myself every morning, and I have lost 3 pounds since we got home...(down 57 pounds since February) I have to stop losing eight.  To quote a friend, I am “looking like a hag and dressing like a teenager”...which I only half agree with.  I get The Bee Man his lunch. After lunch I do another strip on the quilt, pick at something to eat, and do as bit of painting prep.  I make my phone calls, and do my business stuff, then another strip of quilt and do another layer on some painting I am working on. 

The afternoon is my down time.  It is when I run out of energy, and I may watch a youtube, or read a few pages of a book (which I might add, puts me into naptime really quickly.) Usually The Bee Man watches another inevitable old western, and I try to rest for an hour.  When I gt up it is go time again.  I am going to get the storage room sorted while I have all the Christmas boxes/bins out of the way.  That might be considered a resolution, right?  I might work a bit on that today.

I am also craving company.  I am thinking t invited some friends over for dinner and Ramoli for New Years Day… or as soon as they are free.

It is so easy to while the days away in isolation.  I do best when I have company.  I enjoy when Holly drops in and I find others o enjoy time with.  I, also have a friend who has never come for tea yet so I might invite her as well.  I find it very easy to just be but then I get bored and restless.  They break in a day is good for us all. 

Hibernation is not just good for forest animals.  We tend to withdraw due to weather and excuses.  This is a great time to focus on self and what relaxes us and is easier to deal with when winter comes.  We do need to learn to ten to ourselves.  It cannot be all drudgery and isolation.  That is not good for us either.   If we consider last year:  what made us feel goo, what were the highlights, what were the sad things, we can come up with many examples.  This is the time to reflect.  How do you reflect? What soothes you?  How do you hibernate?

©Carol Desjarlais 12.30.23

"Just a reminder

that you đon't have to

make resolutions.

Or huge đecisions.

Or big proclamations.

You can just set

some sweet intentions

and take each đay

as it comes."

Victoria Erickson, Writer

Author, Rhythms & Roads

 

The Art Of Staying Busy

 

 

I’d have never made it as a pioneer.  I can barely bear to go shopping at Walmart for food, never mind go out into the frozen forest in search of something to hunt.  And, I am a busy person who is driven to keep busy but I could not have done all it takes to survive one winter’s day that my ancestors, the Viking women had to endure and get done. I used to be a multi-tasker.  Now. I can hardly stay focused on one task any more, so I end up making stations of ‘busyness” around the house and I move from one thing to another throughout the day… and night. 

I have met a woman who was me twenty years ago, thirty years ago, when it would take another mighty busy woman to task to try to keep up with me.   In fact, I volunteered to help her with several of her busy-making activities.  She asked me why I had helped her and I told her, “Because you are me a few decades ago and I could have used an assistant.”  I know how driven she is.  I remember.  My body is paying for it all now.  I have had to learn to disconnect from busyness as best I can and I, now, include a daily rest time in the mix of my busyness. And I seldom sleep longer than two-hour stints.  I get up in the night and roam around, trying to find something to do.    I am well aware that, at some point, I will reach exhaustion and exhaustion will slam me down and tell me, “I told you to slow down!”  I have.  I am forced to lie down, to rest, and look at the dark side of the moon to deal with what I am running from.  I, in my busyness, am disconnected from my emotions and I am hardly aware of myself, emotionally.  I have always been so.  The more stress, the harder I worked and my poor body was doing double time for it.

Work numbs the other three quadrants of my life.  I stay intellectually immersed through creativity…you will find me doing art, housework, anything to keep from thinking.  I stay emotionally distant.  I do not spend in depth time dealing with spirituality unless it is through the work of art, or creating.  I keep a working schedule while awake and I will stay awake for an hour or two between fitful sleeps I am driven to. I am living a habituation life.  I can no longer work as hard but I still stay busy which, in my warped sense of self, is not being “lazy” and, somewhere in there, I recognize the Puritan ideology that hard work keeps the devil away.   Of all things, why would it lead back to some religious ideology in me?  I need to find time to work some cognitive restructuring and explore all the reasons I allow work to override intellectual, emotional and spiritual aspects of Self.  My life is not in balance and my sleep patterns show it as well.  It is as if I live in short episodes.  Rest has become just another segment of my day.

Things need to change because I am not getting the healing that the body needs and is able to access best when one sleeps.  I am, it seems, full of nervous energy that causes me not to rest at night.  In order to restructure my thought processes and my subconscious worrying, I have to tae the time to consider the WHYS.

What is it that concerns me, at some deep level?  Am I worried something will happen and I will miss it?  What catastrophe could happen if I rested rather than kept awake and working during the hours of night I am awake and doing so? 

I am an aging workaholic.  I do not know what to do with quiet times.  As with all things, I need to begin to set some boundaries or myself. If I get up for other than to go to the bathroom at 3 am, I need to go back to bed and try to go back to sleep.  I have no doubt that I would because I sense I am in a perpetual state of exhaustion.  I am unable to build my energy through sleep and rest.  I have to find ways to retrain myself. 

It may sound simple to those who are not inflicted with inability to rest.  I justify that I get lots done as if that makes me “good”.  Therein lies to crux of it… being busy makes me good.  I learned that in my youth (“Cleanliness is next to godliness”, or some such, was taught to us, modeled for us, expected that we would live busy lives because of). Do I believe that I am going to reach some golden ticket to heaven if I work hard?  Does exhaustion really make me worthy?  This new year I have to turn this round.  Eating this elephant one small bite at a time, means that I will slowly transfer the negative thoughts about rest and sleep into healthier thoughts that rest gives me more energy and I can be more productive. I am reasoning with my psyche.   Being busy is not an art, it is a type of self-punishment for something I am not conscious of. 

Do you relate to any of this?  How are you going to turn negative thoughts about rest into positive ones? 

©Carol Desjarlais 12.29.23