Photography by Lori K. Tate
First off, Happy New Year! I hope you celebrated safely and that you feel some sort of relief that we’re in a new year. Even though things didn’t change much when the clocked ticked from 12:00 to 12:01, I’m clinging to the ounces of hope I have left.
If you’ll remember, I’m not a big fan of New Year’s resolutions (even though I secretly make some in my head). Instead, I pick a word to guide me through the year. Had I known the dumpster fire 2020 was going to be, I might have selected “patience,” “togetherness” or “Netflix” instead of “forward,” but know one knew the disaster we were walking into.
Anyway, now we have a new year with new beginnings, new calendars (yes, I still use one despite the fact that our daily plans change by the hour in pandemic times) and new challenges. Regardless, I’m greeting 2021 with a smile (fingers crossed behind my back) and a new word — intention.
These days we have all the time in the world and no time at all. I find myself daydreaming more often than not, and when I’m not fantasizing about driving a golf cart around Bald Head Island, I’m either cooking up business plans in my head or plotting how to organize our bathroom shelves. The problem with this hub of creativity is that these ideas rarely make it beyond my cerebral cortex. Once in a while, they might make it as far as paper, but if they do, they generally die there.
That said, I’m taking active steps to bring my ideas to fruition. Enter my word of the year — intention (or as my husband calls it, “make it so”).
I have no idea when the world will open up again, but I can’t keep putting things off until that happens. Sure, I’m not going on a cruise or to a crowded basketball game anytime soon, but there are things I really want to do, need to do and can do — if I push myself.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to be one of those annoying self-helpers on the Internet that lays out their plans and goals for the year in a color-coded chart, leaving you feeling that the couch probably is the best option for you after all. (I recently read a book written by a woman like that, and by the end of it, I wanted to use the book as kindling. Instead, I sold it to the used bookstore so someone else could get mad about it.)
It’s not that at all. It’s just that next month I will be one year and six months from turning 50. I’m not dreading it because age is what you make it, but I am cognizant of the passing of time and after 2020, the taking for granted of time.
There are some people who will come out of this pandemic as millionaires because they thought of a need and met it. There are others who will lose everything, and many of those people never fathomed that losing everything could happen to them. I don’t want to be in either party, I just want to live out my potential in a healthy fashion.
The way I see it, intention is the best word to help me spend my time wisely. If I need a day to veg out and watch Sweet Magnolias (LOVE. THIS. SHOW.), then I’m going to do it, but if I have what I think is a good idea, I’m going to try to get it off of paper and into life. That goes for everything from putting hardy plants in my front stoop planters to taking my essay business to the next level. It’s up to me to make these things happen.
Last year is gone, and we can learn so much from its darkness. This year I intend to find the light, and I hope you’ll join me.
Make it so.