Why I’m not making any resolutions

Rewind to New Year’s Eve last year, and I was sitting in my kitchen, waiting for my husband to come home from his late shift, having a glass of wine and trying to write a blog post reflecting on our year.

After many failed attempts at emotional, sad outpourings, I decided to scrap what I’d written and go for a lighter, more positive take on New Year’s.

I wrote this – my hopes for 2015.

It’s been on my mind for a while now but I haven’t wanted to re-read it as it just sounds so ridiculous now. As a family, we’d had a rough time but things were looking up and I was really hoping this year would bring stability and happiness.

Grateful for this ‘normality’, this thing we all try to avoid in our youth but grow up to crave, my list included things like learning to crochet, going to more gigs, booking our first holiday abroad. What it certainly didn’t include was spending many more months in hospital and losing my most favourite person in the world. That was definitely not in the plan.

It’s easy to say things will be better this year, we’ve said goodbye to 2015 and the coming 12 months will be a breeze in comparison. But who can say that for sure? We never know what’s coming, so now more than ever I think it’s time to try to live more in the moment, be thankful for what we have and try, just try, to be kind to ourselves.

I kind of see resolutions as tempting fate now. I think the only one I ever stuck to anyway was when I gave up smoking in 2008 (although I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been tempted to start again pretty much every day for the past couple of years!).

However, I don’t see any harm in taking the time to think about how we could improve our lives, and ourselves, by making a few little tweaks and improvements. I have a lot to think about this year, I’m feeling bit lost and directionless to be honest, and sometimes think I would feel better if I had some sort of plan. But the way things are at the moment I’m just too tired to think ahead and to make any major life decisions. Just getting through each day is an achievement and the things I think would make my life easier are having more time to myself and more time to sleep! Not the easiest or most exciting of goals I know. It’s quite hard to think of anything that would improve life that isn’t the most obvious thing, which is having Rog back and our family all together.

I’d like to think of things which will make this year more bearable, more possible, so things which would generally make daily life that little bit easier. There are loads of big things to tackle, like my tempestuous relationship with my son for one, but I’m not sure today is the day for all that. Today is the day for taking it easy, trying to have a day where we all get along, all have the space to do a little bit of what makes us all happy. Today is a day for wondering how we can heal a little bit and live through this year. Or maybe not just live through it but enjoy it, be stronger because of it, and end the year in a different place to where we are now.

I’ve been reading a few posts this week about the New Year, and this is one of my favourites, on the ace blog The Pool.

It’s called ‘What I’m doing differently in 2016: Everything I should have done already’ and is about how the list of things you might regret not having done are still possible, so why regret them?

If you always feel like you could have done something, then why not get on and do it? I’m feeling an element of that too, seeing as I think a lot about the shortness of life at the moment. There are definitely things I’ve always wanted to do which I haven’t got round to yet, so maybe 2016 will be the year I get to think a bit more about those. I need to go away and fill my diary with some fun stuff, as well as blocking out some quiet time too.

However it goes, I can only hope we (and you!) have a happy and peaceful year and although I know there will be difficult times I hope there are some lighter ones too.

Just like the card says, Hey little fighter, soon things will be brighter.

x Julia

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