Looking Towards 2020

First of all, Happy New Years everyone! Whether you were sleeping, working, or celebrating the ball drop, I hope you had a wonderful New Year’s Eve and have a wonderful first day of 2020.

Like everyone else, I’ve been reflecting on 2019. So much of it seems summed up by mindless days strung together by routine and monotony. But when I actually look back more specifically, there have been several rather eventful things that have happened. January of 2019 we went vegan and haven’t looked back since. I started this blog and started learning how to homestead. My mother and grandmother moved out, leaving Ricky and I alone in our own home and giving us to responsibility of learning how to tend to it. We rented a huge dumpster and got rid of a lot of rubbish we had lying around, I ripped up a carpet all by myself, we planted fruit trees, and started repairing our old shed. Just within the past couple of weeks our car broke down and we had to get a new one. It’s so strange how much can actually change while the days all seem to be the same.

I definitely had some goals for 2019 that I didn’t accomplish, but others I knocked out of the park and new goals that I didn’t know I had came to fruition. So while I’m able to recognize the sort of hopelessness of many New Year resolutions, I’m making some. But I’m not calling them resolutions, I’m calling them goals. They’re going to be specific and I’m going to have a game plan for accomplishing them. My mother always says, “No matter where you go, there you are”. It doesn’t matter how many fresh starts you give yourself, if the changes you make are only to your environment and not yourself, you will probably end up exactly where you started. A new year means absolutely nothing in terms of personal growth unless you actually do something with it.

I have a lot of practical goals, so I won’t bother listing them all here. Things like: Build the garden beds we have planned, read at least one book a month, etc.

I do have one goal that supersedes all the others. It’s a long term goal that I’m not sure how to make a plan of action for. I want to harness my time and energy into building a life that I love and feel good about. Currently, I frequently get lost in fantasizing about things that can never come to be. I believe this to be a form of escapism and distraction that’s especially prevalent when I’m feeling depressed. I really want to work on overcoming this bad habit this year and part of that process is trying out different things and seeing what works. When I do allow my mind to drift, like when I’m laying in bed trying to fall asleep, I want to fantasize about my real life and the real things I can do with it.

Our minds are very, very powerful things. We must take back control from the bad habits we’ve established and the best way I’ve found to do that, is to get out of my head and just do it. Don’t allow imperfections to deter progress and unabashedly commit to plugging along when you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. The time will pass anyway. You might as well have something to show for yourself on the other end.

Good luck!