Happy New Year! - The Julia Calendar

Happy Birthday to me.

I feel like that should be more exciting. 

Happy Birthday to Me! 

Yeah. That's more like it. Today is my new year. The day I start or restart resolutions. The first day - even the first month - of the Gregorian calendar year is too close the NOHS, so I start my new year now. On my birthday. 

Last year almost killed me: new (horrifying) administration, new (awful) commute, new (unfinished, constant construction noise) place of work, new (*&%#) hormones? 2017 just blew in so many ways.

What's happening in this new year? This, my birth day, was relaxing and without much celebrating. However, I'm going to Iceland in five days! And I'm moving in twenty days to a neighborhood I've wanted to live in for over a decade! 

So. There's that.

But I don't want to jinx 2018 by even implying that it will be better than 2018. I am not an optimist as I've said before. I firmly believe the glass is half empty, and there's a golf ball hurtling towards it. But this year... Hope is an action verb. 

Happy New Year.

Happy New Year - the Julia Calendar

I start my year on my birthday. The Julia Calendar is far more reasonable than the Julian. It’s silly to try to start some brand new habit on January 1st. We’ve all been in the national orgy of holidays and celebrations and travel and general unrest. My birthday, today, is close enough to the beginning of the year to still feel new, clear, with a bite of winter.

I had random ideas for this past year, but I couldn’t have planned it. In fact, I didn’t. I tried. I kept coming up with The Plan and then changing it. What happened this year wasn’t so much about what I did or where I went, but about taking the time to just be. I can’t explain easily what that did for me, but I can tell you the resolutions it gave me for the new year.

New Year’s Resolutions

• Keep writing. I finished a novel this year. I started another one. I’ve got a third brewing in my brain. Ideas for a fifth and a sixth….
• Keep interviewing people. I love talking to them about their lives, their work, their dreams. Yes, please.
• Keep traveling. I must return to Edinburgh. Period. Other places too. And not “some day.” Soon.
• Keep being curious. About life, about myself.
• Keep being passionate about what I love, no matter how random. Color. "That’s not even a thing," you say. It is. It is.
• Keep giving myself space to be the person I am.

It’s been an enlightening year. A year ago, the Monday after my last birthday, I resigned from my job to take a year-long sabbatical. I’d decided that one day wasn’t enough to celebrate a half century.

This whole year has been a celebration of this birthday. The sabbatical has ended, but The Bliss Tour continues.