It is quite easy to “take time to smell the roses” while you convalesce, in fact, it is perhaps the easiest thing to do. Each sweet bouquet that arrived on my doorstep brought more and more easy joy, gracing our home for more days than you might imagine, with stems of pink and yellow and red, all the colors not seen out our windows during this monochromatic season. Of course, with each flower came healing, their power born of beauty and grace, love and hope.
I must say I am finding all sorts of avenues to court joy these days. Sometimes it’s in the competency of the woman who needs to draw a vile of blood from me, or in a colleague who sends an especially sweet text after an afternoon run with me, or a dear friend who has offered to do me a huge favor with her precious and newly retired time. Joy floats all around in those sweet gifts. But there is something else that I am feeling. I am just really happy with many of my choices: those made yesterday, last year, maybe even ten years ago, when I set in motion a lifestyle with Future Me in mind. You get what I mean right? It didn’t all happen at once, but little by little I realized that I needed to lead Present Me around on a short lease and think about tomorrow. She’s a bit of a wild child who wants to run, well wild, this Present Me. She’s not always reliable. She’s not factual either. Oh the stories she tells afterwards are pretty colorful, but they can led to a less than happy future me. Sometimes Present Me does win me over, and sometimes, even in her worst decisions, I smile, a bit hungover, with sore dancing feet, and an embarrassing selfie plastered all over my socials at midnight… but mostly, I keep her in check.
5 survival tips from last January that I highly recommend we all put into practice this year too. But I will add a 6th tip: Laugh. Find people who crack you up and spend as much time with them as you can. Over lunch. An afternoon run. Even an 8 minute phone call. Laugh to make light in the dark: that’s how I plan to face January, and the rest of 2023.
I know what you’re thinking, that this is just another New Year’s resolution post, with a long list that will all be given over at first light, but this is not that at all. This is about survival. January is long, dark, cold, and for the teachers/ healthcare providers/ service workers/ parents/ and everyone else functioning through this pandemic all around the globe, a tough month. So besides my all-the-time best-advice to start each day with Yoga with Adriene, I am going to share 5 survival tips I plan to use to face all that gets dished out, piled on, and added on to this rugged month.
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Nine Cent Girl 