month 1

I wanted to spend some serious time organizing my house in January. I spent some. I wanted to do some home improvement projects that would require me to remember some "handy" skills I used to have. I hung one picture. I wanted to do some deep cleaning. I did none.

I intended to just do two or three tasks a week. Never did I do more than one. Some weeks were less.

In other words, January was a failure in terms of "accomplishing" goals.

One of the reasons I failed was that midway through the month, I stopped believing in my goal. I wondered if my goal wasn't set because the world says I should declutter and be clean, and maybe that wasn't what the Lord wanted me to be focusing on right now. I spent some time considering what I should be focusing on.

I spent a lot of time wondering if I would ever feel normal again, and what feeling normal was. For me, for a long time, I've had a general sense that I'm pretty much a doing a mediocre job on everything, except that assessment value is probably just in my head, and I guess I'm doing okay - trust me, it's a hard head space to live in.

I spent a lot of the month facing my lifelong weaknesses: a tendency to procrastinate any thing that lacks a deadline (cleaning anyone?), often hiding in a book (oh, so virtuous is reading) to avoid other less pleasant tasks (like phone calls or parenting), and not prioritizing cleaning up (who saw my room growing up? oh yeah, no one, because my parents ignored the mess if I kept the door closed).

And I spent a lot of the last week considering where to go in February, what goals to set, and how to improve. Because I want to be mindfully better at the end of the year.