7ToF: make it so, number one

1. We've all sometimes seen the disconnect between someone's online presentation and their real life. Some present a carefully curated front to the world, some seem to be genuinely themselves, although I suppose you can never really know how real it is. Here, in this blog, I hope you can tell that I make no claims that this is an accurate representation of my life-- it's just whatever I'm thinking about at the time I'm writing.

2. But in case it isn't obvious, I have bad days. Weeks. Dean and I have rough patches in our marriage, more often than we probably should after 34 years of marriage. I sometimes lose sleep worrying about my kids. I can drive myself to distraction obsessively trying to figure out what I'm doing next-- back to work? more volunteer work? three months in the UK? (you have no idea how much that last one tempts me). There are days when I have a hard time thinking of a reason to get out of bed.

3. Some people-- for example, the Bloggess-- can turn their bad days/weeks/childhood into hilarious, touching, meaningful posts, but when I try to do it, it turns out maudlin and boring. It bores me, so lord knows I'm not inflicting it on you. At least not very often. But in case you can't tell, it seems important to put it out there. I don't think I'm projecting an image of a perfect life here, but if I am, now you know. Things can be (and often are) a mess around here. So there. That's enough about that.

4. I don't do New Year's resolutions because I can never keep them, but having a theme, something I want to work on, has been a good thing in the past. My word/theme for 2019 is action. Be active. Take action. Participate. Engage rather than observe. Do instead of think. Or at least, don't just think. Maybe engage is a more succinct way of putting it, and it has the additional benefit of invoking Captain Picard, which is never a bad thing, right?

5. About this time last year, I read Dan Harris's book 10% Happier, where he describes how he has used meditation to cope with anxiety and stress. He talks about one of his mentors, Mark Epstein, in a way that intrigued me, and I just finished reading Epstein's book Advice Not Given. I'm gradually becoming convinced that a more serious meditation practice than my usual half-assed attempts would be a good thing for me, but I think I need a little more structure than just thinking, hey! I should meditate more often! So I've been poking around various meditation apps and I downloaded Dan's 10% Happier app a few days ago. So far, I like it. I'll let you know how it goes.

6. I think I told you awhile ago about hearing Whitney from the Unread Shelf Project on Anne Bogel's podcast What Should I Read Next. I think last year when I started on Bookstagram (a subset of Instagram found by following the hashtag #bookstagram), I became much more aware of new books that were being published, and pretty editions of old books, and instead of buying fewer books last year I think *cringe* I actually bought more. So inspired by Whitney, I'm renewing my intention from last year to not buy new books and instead read the ones I've got.

7. Because I have lots of good books sitting on my shelves that I want to read. Step one of the #unreadshelfproject2019 is to count the number of unread books you have. So I did this yesterday. I didn't count books that belong to other family members, and I didn't count ebooks. My number: 172, which is considerably fewer than I thought it would be. Which makes this seem like a much more doable project. I'm not going to get them all read this year, of course, but I can cross a few off the list. And I can use the money I would have spent on books to save for the trip to the UK, right?

What are your plans for the new year?

Previous posts about New Year's:
be forewarned that as long and wordy as my posts are now, they used to be worse.
New Year's Not Resolution (2010)
Six Days into 2014
Last year's offline experiment (2018)