Resolute.

I don’t believe in making New Year’s resolutions. The concept is too clichéd, the resolutions themselves too fragile. Really, I stopped making New Year’s resolutions as part of my recovery from my eating disorder; inevitably, my resolutions were about losing weight. Giving that up was like throwing away my scale: liberating and absolutely necessary.

But this year I’m making an exception to my rule. There’s just something so fresh and new about January 1^st, I find it hard to resist freighting this arbitrary date with special meaning.

And so here I am, resolving something for 2011: this year, I will begin my adventures in mindfulness anew.

My forays last year were interrupted by…well, my life. My 2010 was filled with both sorrow and joy in equal measure, but those highs and lows were at times so overwhelming it was all I could do to just batten down my emotional hatches and let it all wash over me. I quite often didn’t have the strength to do more than just make it through the day, so trying to work on my relationship with food seemed impossible.

But just last week it hit me like a bolt from the blue: I remembered that the reason I decided to explore mindfulness in the first place was to learn to be more present in my life. Whatever is happening in my life, be it joyful or tragic, I want to be there for it. I do think there is a certain utility to checking out when events are particularly overwhelming, but I have spent too many precious years stuffing down my emotions. That seemed like a reasonable coping mechanism when I was 18, but now that I’m 42? It seems like a shameful fucking waste of something terribly precious.

What does this resolution actually mean, in concrete terms? I wish I knew. I guess figuring that part out is part of this journey, and that’s the whole purpose of this blog: exploring, documenting, journeying, and figuring shit out along the way. If I had a road map or a protocol, I wouldn’t need all this…but then again, that would be quite beside the point. This is my life to figure out, after all, and I'm afraid I'm the only one who can figure out how to figure it out. (Agh!)

So. Here I go, again.

Image: nlmAdestiny under CC BY 3.0.