New Year’s Day has come and gone. We are already in the second week of 2022. As 2021 drew to a close, I thought about what I wanted to focus on in the coming year. I questioned whether I was going to make specific New Year’s Resolutions or if I was going to focus on smaller monthly goals, or if I was going to simply try to “live my best life.”
While I certainly want to live my best life, I don’t think that is possible to the fullest extent without some planning and purpose and intentional action. Thus, I think goals or focused action plans or visualization boards are necessary, though perhaps not all of these things are needed depending on your personality and inclinations. Some people love making lists and actually use them while others only go so far as to write a task down but never complete it.
My dad is a list man. For years, I saw him carry around white 3×5 index cards and write down to-do lists on these cards; I also saw him constantly pulling them out of his pocket to cross an item off his list that he had just completed. For him, this method worked, and he still uses it to this day. For my mom, lists don’t have the same effect or appeal; in fact, I would say there were times when writing to-do lists actually hindered her desire or ability to get things done because the list served as negative pressure or a guilty reminder of forgotten tasks.
So far this year, I had two goals, if you will, and I have failed to reach either of them consistently thus far. For starters, I wanted to go to bed earlier and get up earlier. Even though getting out of bed at 5am is hard for me, it creates a tremendous level of satisfaction to read and write at this time of day, especially now that I have two young children and this is really the best–and often only–time I can have to myself. And the best way to assure that I can get up early is to go to bed at a decent time, since I am not one of those people who can still seem to function and even thrive on little sleep.
Despite my best laid plans, life has merely laughed at me these first two weeks of the new year. Both my kids and I got sick with colds, and the sniffles held on in my daughter for days. This affected her sleep, which was only okay at best as she comes up on ten months old, and so for days she was waking up multiple times a night and sometimes staying up for hours. On New Year’s Eve, I was in her room almost without a break from 9pm until 1:30am, and then I was up again with her at 5am. I got less than four hours of sleep that night, and the next night was barely better.
So, I was faced with two options after this continued for a few days–while I really couldn’t control how early I went to bed when my daughter wouldn’t go to sleep for hours, I could still get up early and start the day with three or four hours of sleep, or give myself a break and sleep an extra hour or two and forgo my early morning quiet time.
Since I began to feel especially run down after a few days of this, I chose to take option B and sleep rather than get up early and operate on only a few hours of sleep. This decision made me feel like a failure with my New Year’s goal right out of the gate, but the logical part of my brain recognized two things:
First, if I was too exhausted to use that time well, or if I was extra tired and cranky during the rest of the day, getting up early was defeating the purpose that I had intended for that time in the first place. One morning, I simply stayed up after being awake with my daughter since 3:15am, and I was so tired that, during the hour I was supposed to be writing, I kept lying my head down on the desk. I didn’t get any quality writing done and was irritable the rest of the day, feeling overwhelmed by every little issue that came up.
Second, sometimes life is going to throw curveballs at me and I will stumble, but I can always course correct, or in the case where I fall down, I can always get back up and try again. The purpose of me going to bed early and getting up early was to carve out a bit of dedicated time to write and read every day, and to work on one specific writing project I have. Realizing that taking off a few days, or even a week or two, would not derail my overarching goal and purpose helped me keep things in perspective. Yes, I missed out on a few days of writing this month, but I still managed to find time to write in the evening a few of those days, and I am still dedicated to my writing project.
While I didn’t start out the year with quite the bang I was hoping for in the goals department, with me hitting the sack at 9:30pm and jumping out of bed refreshed and eager for the day at 5am, I am allowing myself some grace in the face of the obstacles that popped up.
If you have also stumbled in meeting your goals for whatever reasons already this year, remember that each day is a chance to start again. We are a mere 13 days into 2022 and there are 352 more days in this year to honor your goals. Don’t give up–just start afresh today.
