A New Year!

Wow, it's been over a year since I've written.

It's been a busy, busy year, and I've been taking a little breather this past week to slow down and take stock. Every year around this time I do a little yearly review. I take stock of where I am and where I want to be in the following areas of my life:

Health
Diet
Home
Spirit
Mind
Finance
Work
Leisure

One of my goals this year is to "clean up the past." I plan to complete and shut the door to anything in the past that is weighing me down in the present. This includes little things, like sorting through my summer clothes and getting rid of whatever I didn't wear this past summer, purging books I'm not reading. I've been updating my filing systems -- something I suggest everyone do at least once per year. Taking those old paints and broken electronics to the recycling center. It also includes bigger things, like finding the time to get back into that exercise routine, and seeking more balance in how I spend my time, and finding time for leisure.

You notice that leisure falls at the bottom of my list. I actually forgot to put in on the list until just now. This New York Times article explores the procrastination of pleasure.

It sounds odd, but this is actually a widespread form of procrastination — just ask the airlines and other marketers who save billions of dollars annually from gift certificates that expire unredeemed.

The death of my stepfather this year has woken me up a bit to my "pleasure procrastination." Tom was 61 and died one month after they discovered cancer had spread throughout his body. One day he was working and swimming, the next, he was bedridden and dying. It's very painful to watch someone in the midst of living be torn away from their grip on life. His wasn't an easy death, physically or mentally, in part because of the suddenness of it. There was no time for him to mourn the lost dreams, the lost hopes. The realization he wouldn't see his grandchildren grow up, wouldn't see another full moon, wouldn't feel the hot sun on his face or smell the freshly cut grass again. Death is the ultimate loss -- the loss of everything we know on this earth.

It reminds me of my favorite movie quote. The move was the Sheltering Sky (1990).

Because we dont know when we will die, we get to think of
life as an inexhaustible well, yet everything happens only a
certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many
more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood,
some afternoon thats so deeply a part of your being that you can't
even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times
more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the
full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

So in this new year, I am reflecting on those things that matter, that I want in my life, that I want to have seen or experienced or accomplished. Maybe it's time to stop procrastinating on redeeming those air miles....