Ring in the new year

It's another new year, and I think it's going to take me awhile to remember that this is 2017 and not 2016.  Granted 2016 was a really strange and exhausting year that I would like to forget in many respects, but most strange of all I seem to have grown accustomed to it that I can't seem to feel like this is really a new year.

And as we all know, the start of a new year is typically when people make resolutions and goals for themselves.  Within two weeks at least 98% of them will have either forgotten or discarded those goals.  I can't deny I've had my own challenges there.  I'm not sure I have ever had a year in which I achieved all of my goals.  In some years it was because I set too many goals.  In other years, it was because I didn't have the support I needed to pursue my goals through the rough patches that life seems always willing to provide.

This year, I've decided to keep it simple and make just one goal: To live my best life in 2017.  I just want to do my best to rise above mediocrity and have a life that, while always amazingly busy, will be soul-satisfying and deeply nourishing.  I don't intend to make my life perfect by the end of the year, because I don't believe that my best life means having a perfect one.  I think my best life is more about the journey than the destination, and while I will always find room for and reach after improvement in most if not all areas of my life, I think my best life is filled more with that reaching than with arriving.  That doesn't mean I don't forward to arriving.  I just think there is joy to be had in the journey of improvement that resides independent of the joy of accomplishment.  Filling my life with that joy from the journey is what I believe will make my best life in 2017.

I'll be posting in the future as the year progresses, so we'll see if I make any progress in it as well.  All in all, I feel satisfied that I have simplified everything down to one goal for the year.  I know it's not very specific or measurable, but that's really the point.  This year I wanted something focused more on process than product, more on the journey than the destination.  I'm not looking for a result in terms of achievement so much as a result in terms of a state of being.  Again, I'll post more as the year progresses.  I look forward to a wonderful journey this year.

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