New Year's Resolution Resolution

Here I sit on December 31 with my hands on my keyboard. This is usually where I sigh pitifully and pound out an email to my friends begging them to please hold me accountable for one or more of my ridiculous resolutions for the coming year. 

Over the years, I've declared them all. Get healthier. Practice music more. Clean out the closets. Read more. Read less. Read better. Keep my car clean. Change the sheets every single Sunday. Don't be late so much. Stop being afraid of snakes so I can sit through a movie without living in fear one will slither across the screen and terrify me into cardiac arrest. Laugh more. Cry less. Write the great American novel and retire to a deserted island where I will write anyway. Go to the gym, on purpose. Recycle. Reduce debt. Increase giving. Call old friends. Find new homes for some of my books. Adopt new books.

The list continues. It isn't a bad list, not really. They're all good things I could stand to do, but the problem with resolutions is that they are January's version of a Christmas tree--they stick around until all your friends start hauling their dried up, brown-edged resolutions out to the trash can with the stale sugar cookies, and you start thinking maybe yours are starting to look a little dried up and brown-edged, too. They're not reasonable. They're not a big deal. They're just something everyone says out loud because they mean well, not because they expect to still be thinking about them in the middle of September.

That's why this year's New Year's resolution is just that: resolution itself.

This year I am not going to make a list of wonderful new things I should start. Instead, I'm going to focus on wonderful old things I should finish.

I have known myself all my life (except a brief period when I was three and had my tonsils out. Apparently the anesthesia they gave me was good stuff). That is almost long enough for me to get a grip on my fatal flaw. Well, one of them. I'm eaten up with flaws, and probably more than a few are fatal. Either way, one of them is this: I am a non-finisher. I am a self-sabotager. I am a focus-loser.

I lack resolution.

No, it really doesn't.

I can get a grip on this tendency where it counts for most people. I follow through in my job. I'm there for other people when they need me, and I do what I will say I will do when it affects any other person but myself--at least, I always try and most of the time I manage it. 

But when it's myself? Yeah...there we have a problem.

This year, I say I owe it to myself to pick up those lose threads and start weaving them back together. I am going to pick up where I left off on resolutions past, and I'm going to resolve them. I am going to do what I meant to do, what I know I can do, and I'm going to stop letting life get in the way of Life.

I will finish off those half-written novels and stories, draw my drawings, craft my crafts, blog my blog, learn my lessons, and go the distance. It has been a long, strange journey and it is finally time I arrived at my destination.

Happy 2014, everyone!