“What do I do with my life now?” The house is clean. Our plan is working. What can I do after Messy Room Syndrome?
I took three days to just think about my future. I have wasted so much of my life already fighting this battle, I don’t want to waste another minute.
FOCUS
The key that brought me into this new situation was learning to focus on just one thing. I know I need to carry that habit forward. Flylady says, “Focus makes me fabulous.” Dave Ramsey calls it “gazelle intensity.” I just know it gets the job done.
Maybe instead of trying to do everything in balance all the time, I should focus my intensity on on project. If you look at a day or a week in my life, it may look out of balance, but over the course of a year or 5 years or a lifetime a pattern of balance will emerge from the periods of focused intensity. What’s more, the periods of focus will result in goals met and dreams accomplished.
What’s the next big thing?
The next thing that has been irritating me for a while is the extra 35 pounds of fat I am carrying around. This is Fitness Feburary in my house. I’m setting up my own at home Biggest Loser Ranch and working to lose this extra weight and built some muscle. Hopefully it won’t take me quite as long to declutter my body as it took to declutter my house.
New Year’s Day is always so fresh, so hopeful, so inspiring. It offers a new start with no mistakes in it yet. Seven days into the new year and I already ditched my long weekend run and the house is a mess.
The good news is that tomorrow can be just as new, just as fresh, just as inspiring, and just as blemish free as midnight New Year’s day when we watched all the fireworks go off, blew those funny little whistles, and yelled “Happy New Year!”
Tomorrow is a fresh start. Pull that funny whistle out if you need to and yell, “Happy New Day!”
P.S. In my defense, I was fighting a cold all weekend and we started remodeling our bedroom.
A year-and-a-half ago, if you had asked me what my 3 greatest fears are, My answer would have been:
- Childbirth
- Surgery (or specifically wisdom teeth extraction)
- blowing out my knees.
A year ago I gave birth, with no pain medication, to a sweet baby boy. Midway through the birth, I looked at the doctor and said, “You know, this is kind of uncomfortable.” If I hadn’t faced that fear, I never would have known the amazing love that washed over me the first time I held my son. One of the first things I thought after giving birth was, “Maybe now I can get my wisdom teeth out.”
In September, I convinced myself that wisdom teeth extraction couldn’t be worse than a 2 day migraine starting every 3 days. My life was being stolen from me by those migraines. My weeks, over the past year have been a constant cycle of migraine and recovery. I scheduled an appointment for my wisdom teeth extraction and on November 12, I faced that fear with courage (and a librivox recording of Peter Pan).
You know, I survived. I found out that the “good” drugs make me feel horrible. When I come face to face with a monster, my courage stood, and when courage failed, prayer and nitrous oxide are wonderful relaxation tools.
Eighteen wonderful days passed without a migraine, and when I finally got one on Monday, it wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t function. During those 18 days, I started a gym membership and began running. For a long time, I have dreamed of being able to run and run and run without getting out of breath or getting tired. My goal is to run Bloomsday 12K in May 2010, and I would like to run a 1/2 or full marathon by the end of next year. This is doublly significant because let’s face it runners injure their knees and exercise has been one of my consistent migraine triggers.
At the rate I am going, I’m either going to have to find some more fears or start living my life. Or both.
Taking down monsters only to find out that they are paper tigers is kinda fun.
