Making A New Resolution
We are 12 days into the New Year, which, for a lot of people, means that every resolution they made has fallen off the books. Hitting the gym at 6 am, reading every day, or cutting out sugar often gets thrown out the window the second we slip up on our new habit. It's something people face every year as they make life-changing habits that either aren't sustainable for their stage of life or are a lot harder than they were ready to handle. It's going to take more than a few weeks to undo decades of opposing habits.
I want to talk about a few things today. The first is that the New Year isn't the only time, or maybe even the best time, to institute life changes. There are a lot of natural points in our lives to reset our dreams and plans. In January, I will have the reset points of the New Year, a PCS, and a conference at the end of the month.
We have to reset our plans when summer begins and then again when school starts back. The same things that worked for spring break won't work for winter break. The same things that worked for a deployment won't work for a TDY. The same things that worked during allergy season won't work during flu season. We need to constantly be prepared to shift with our changing needs. Waiting until next year to start over isn't the answer. Instead, we can find the natural shifts in our lives, and they can feel like the perfect opportunity to start again.
This brings me to my second point. We have to create plans that incorporate flexibility, life, and inspiration. Most people don't work well under a 9-5 monotonous schedule where every moment of our day is planned out. I certainly don't. I have to have a plan that ensures I get my work done while allowing space for the days when my son skips his nap and won't let me put him down. A plan that includes going to the gym three days a week will often work better than one that sets strict timetables for accomplishing that because we will always run into days where we didn't set ourselves up for success as much as we could.
We have to be prepared for obstacles to come our way. Military spouses are very familiar with Murphy's law when it comes to separations, but the same applies to our plans when it comes to dreaming. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. We won't be perfect, and we won't handle everything perfectly, but we can set ourselves up for success by creating plans that allow chaos to ensue. It won't fix everything or make things easier, but it will make staying on track possible with the stage of life that we find ourselves in.
And that brings us full circle to my third point today: we need to find the grace and strength to get back on track when we fall off. Messing up the plan is inevitable. It doesn't matter how perfect it was or how "easy" it was to accomplish. Anything that is easy to achieve is just as easy not to. Think of how many people commit to making their bed every day and fall off the rails with that. For most people, making the bed doesn't take many spoons (and this point is for those people), but it's even easier to leave it unmade no matter how inspired we were to start the habit in the first place.
We have two options when we mess up the plan. We can either throw the baby out with the bath water, which in this case is ditching the plan and the dream entirely. Or we can forgive ourselves, figure out what, if anything, went wrong, fix it, and get back on track again. Sometimes, nothing really goes wrong; we just have a bad day. That's ok as long as we get back up and try again. Last week, I shared how I missed Friday's post because I was overwhelmed, burnt out, and dealing with a pounding headache. I couldn't have done much to change the stress of moving. I already had a lot of support and safeguards in place. None of that changed the fact that I wasn't in a position to work my plan properly. But it also didn't derail me because I got back on track this week. I'm confident I'll fall off again, but I also know I'll get right back up.
Wherever you're finding yourself in the new year, I hope there's still a spark to your dreams. The plans may have failed, but that doesn't mean the dream went away, and it doesn't mean we can't start again. Just keep showing up. That's how we get there because one day, something will click, and all that hard work that it took to build a plan and habit will finally pay off.