Happy New Year 2018: a Resolution Revolution

Here we go…extraordinary 2018!

It’s a new year, a new calendar, a new start.  I love a new calendar, it’s like a clean slate.  No creases or dog-ears, no chicken-scratches lined through and rewritten in another box.  No mayhem.  Just an open book full of possibility and promise.

Before I write in all the appointments, extracurriculars and school inservices, I page through my calendar and enjoy the work my husband has gone to to create each month’s snapshot and how I want my family’s year to be filled with the same joy his art brings to each of the calendar’s 12 months.  I also ponder what I hope to achieve personally, knowing that what ever it is I select will have its own impact on my family and friends.

It’s no small decision.

I’ve never been a fan of resolutions.  It seems there is something unwritten in the underbelly of the big “R” that prophesies forgetfulness and failure about a month in.  So instead of “resolving” I chose “living.”  I didn’t come to this fully on my own.  A friend on Facebook asked for just one word to embody the year.  A personal statement of brevity from which to work and frame 2018.  I chose “authenticity.”  I want to simply be who I am, in everything I do, to everyone I know.  And be comfortable in doing so.  I also came across a list from the website bemorewithless.com that I will use as my game plan for achieving a full, authentic lifestyle:

10 Ways to Live an Extraordinary Life

Pay attention.

Be grateful.

Stop comparing.

Let go.

Make space.

Slow down.

Admire small miracles.

Write it down.

Act like a tourist.

Be extraordinary.

I think often about the eulogy my husband gave his father in August of 2017.  As my husband said so touchingly and eloquently, his dad’s work on earth isn’t done.  He is like a pebble dropped in a pond, whose ripples move concentrically outward, expanding and filling the pond.  The pond is our world; we are the ripples.  We can carry on what the “pebble”, my father-in-law, started.

His dad was full of life and love and gave freely of himself to everyone.  He was the real deal…authentic.  No need for airs, no need to impress.  He just was who he was and that was extraordinary. He did it all by following the 10 Ways listed above, only he didn’t have the checklist above to guide him.

So I chose to live the extraordinary life.  To ripple outward and carry forward what my father-in-law embodied.  Call it a resolution revolution.

To do and to be the extraordinary.