2015 was an amazing, life changing, full of surprises year for me.Yes, I'm expecting a baby early this year, but my pregnancy was one of the few things in 2015 that I actually did plan. :) This time last year I had a lot of goals and expectations for myself which I won't even bother to write out here. Instead of presenting me with smooth sailing and the opportunity to accomplish them, 2015 threw new challenges at me that I had not dreamed of facing. To top off an incredibly difficult year, my closest friendship ended in a way that was completely devastating and I'm still not able to fully process it. I had had such a difficult year and I had lost the one person I went to to talk about everything... even the most minor annoyances of my life.
Towards the end of this year I had so much STUFF to process that the only thing that kept me sane was trail running. The endorphins together with the beauty and peace of the woods were the very best therapy I could find. Then within one week I got sciatica so severe I could barely walk across my kitchen and had to give up running and even walking outside at all.
Though I might be tempted to think it, life is not against me. Life is showing me that I'm much much stronger and flexible than I think. For every setback there is an equal blessing, if I can only look past my disappointment to see it. In losing my friendship, I learned to appreciate my family and others in my life so much more. Because of being forced to stop running I
discovered yoga which I never dreamed of having the patience for before now.
Leo, who writes one of my favorite blogs, http://zenhabits.net/ says
that goals are not always helpful and that instead of making a goal we
should focus on making a small change of habit, or by setting a "rule"
for ourselves. For example if you want to write a book you don't make a
goal to finish a book by 2017, instead you simply schedule 20 minutes of
time to write in your day. The only real difference is that the focus
is on the activity (writing) rather than the end of the road (the book).
I've learned to aim more for intrinsic versus extrinsic goals, and at least some of the time I now remember more than ever to be grateful for the incredibly rich life I do have. I'm a lot happier with myself, and happier in the moment. It's not about goals, it's about life as a journey as a whole and more than that it's about accepting each moment as it is now and seeing the beauty in it's imperfection. You can't focus so much on goals that you forget the big (and invariably better) picture. You can't try to force things into being perfect or how you want them to be without missing the beauty in what is.
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