What we do and what we DON'T do.

I’ve spent a lot of time this week thinking about resolutions. I’m resolving to do a lot of things this year to improve the quality of my life and become a more whole, spiritual and mature person. These are big goals, and I know that it’s not going to be easy to stick to my resolutions every day. In fact, today was DAY ONE of trying to achieve these resolutions, and I missed my alarm clock and got up too late to go to the gym this morning. If I can’t make it happen on the very first day of the new year (at least on my schedule), how am I supposed to stick to this for 365 days?

But I’m trying not to berate myself too much. I was reading a book this week about spiritual guidance, and one of the chapters was about improving your life. It said that it’s so easy for us to figure out what we want our lives to be like. We want to be happy and healthy and spiritual and great girlfriends and better daughters and high-achievers with clean houses, polite children and home-cooked meals every night. Right? That doesn’t sound too bad. That sounds like a person I want to be. But the book goes on to tell us that deciding this isn’t the hard part. The hard part is deciding what we’re going to give up in order to live our lives like this. What are we willing to let go to live as a happy, healthy and spiritual person? What are we going to NOT do in order to make room in our lives and hearts for the person we want to be?

This, it seems like, is the really difficult question. I’ve been thinking about this all week. I keep thinking of things that I might be willing to give up, and then realizing that I’m not really ready to give that up at all. For example, for a few minutes, I thought I could give up reality TV in favor of spending time with my spiritual self. Probably not going to happen. I thought I could give up working late to give myself more time to cook myself healthy dinners. Not so sure if I could let this happen or if my boss would like it either.

Since I’m not ready to make big changes in my life, I started to think about the little things I can do to make a few more inches of space in my life for something better. I’m going to let myself cross a few things off the “to do” list or the “you should do list” in order to give myself a better chance of being the person a want to be. It’s a short list right now, but hopefully with time I’ll be comfortable enough to add more things to this list and make that space for happiness and peacefulness to grow. Here she is:

1. I’m not going to go to happy hour or any other after-work function if I don’t feel like it. So often I go because I think I should go (since I live alone and have zero to few friends in DC). But usually, I leave happy hour frustrated that I didn’t get to do what I wanted to do at home. I’m going to let myself say no in favor of spending more time on myself.
2. I’m not going to learn how to play golf. I keep thinking that I should because I work in sales, and so many of our events are golf outing, but I don’t really want to learn. Golf lessons take up a lot of time and energy that I want to exert on other things, at least at this point in my life.
3. I’m not going to exert energy on relationships that aren’t mutual. So many times I feel myself carrying a burden for an acquaintance or a friend who doesn’t reciprocate by  carrying my burdens when I need it or uplifting my soul when I’m down. By doing too much for too many people, I’m not focusing on friendships that are really important. I’m spreading myself too thin and not giving the best of myself to those who deserve it most. This doesn’t mean that I can’t be kind to strangers or help out when I can. It just means that the focus of my love and attention will be on the friends and family who deserve it most.

To checking things off the “to NOT do” list,

Lia