Mom Says:
We took on last year with a saying.. “Come Before Winter”. It was borrowed from a story in the bible. One about Paul encouraging his friend Timothy to do his utmost to come before winter to visit him. As you can imagine, in the long run, Timothy is too late. By the time he comes (in Spring) Paul had died. The theme being its important to take action now vs waiting till later. We are not religious but those words have become our everything.
For us, it became our cue that rather than saying someday we will do it, we will do it now.
2015 holds so much promise and I know that if we just go after it all, we can make many more epic things happen. But I also know in pushing myself HARD last year to make everything work, I created a rather unhealthy state of living for myself.
At the beginning of the year, I was getting up at 5am to exercise for our weight-loss challenge, it felt good & I felt strong. By the end of the year I created a cycle of working till 1-2am and getting up at 5am to keep going. I felt overwhelmed and full of anxious. It caused throat-closing, near panic attacks, a lot of tears & my husband gazing at me in complete bewilderment.
I know…I did it to myself.
I see so much opportunity and know I can make shit happen. I have that skill and I do it well. But last year, the most important thing I learned was the value of relationships. I was concentrating so much on work, I started wondering if I was I was missing the better part of being a parent, a wife and finding time for myself? So here I was panicking about work and panicking about what I wasn’t doing while working. Jesus…how the hell is that effective?
I started stripping down to basics and asking the question – What feeds my soul?
I am still working on that list but I know a big part of what drives me is creativity. I designed a number of events & strategies this year that I am really proud of and started writing more because of a writing challenge. It has awakened something in my mind that has felt too process driven for far too long. It is helping me breathe and makes me happy. It has become the promise I look forward to feeding in ’15.
Dad says:
This was not the easiest post to comment on; we decided when doing this not to temper our opinions or edit, and that is all good until your wife writes something like this. Because it was true, and ugly, and really hard to overcome.
Nobody wants to hear you talk about all your problems: doing that at a cocktail party will get you a seat in the corner next to the ferns, which might be a good listener but short on sharing. This stuff was happening every day, where I would go to bed hearing the click of keys and wake up to the same. I like the internet as much as anyone, but some times its gotta stop. A lot of what Jenn was working on was not productive or fulfilling. It was just stuff, and that can crowd you out as quickly electronically as that national geographic collection can overwhelm your rec room in the real world. I think you wind up in a perpetual avalanche of thoughts and feelings that slowly suffocate you. I am lucky enough to be what some would call ‘mildly inattentive’, or what Jenn refers to as ignorant of my current surroundings. I can sleep anywhere, and easily zone out and morph to my situation with little energy. Not exactly a super power, but it tends to keep me real sane for the majority. We have resolved to try a bit more of this together, and will keep you posted. Hopefully behind schedule and sporadically, but thats part of the 12 step program.
Now if Jenn will let me plan a party and see if people have fun with pre made foods and canned music vs laborious hand made dips and personalized playlists, we will have conquered this mountain too.
