What is my New Year’s Resolution?

Is it a calendar so I realize that it is September and not January?

No, I realize it is September.  Do not worry about me (yet)!

As a teacher for the last 30 years, my whole adult life after college, my circadian rhythms have gone steadily along with the school calendar.

As vacations grew near, my body would get more tired. The same thing would happen at the end of the year, as things were winding down.

And of course, as August drew to a close, the anxiety levels would grow. There was the anticipation of the year, students, administrators, goals, and RESOLUTIONS!

Which brings me back to: Happy New Year! 

As my child just returned to her new school year (yesterday, in fact), I started to think of what my goals for the new school year involved. They look a little different than when I was teaching full-time, but also there are similarities.

1. Time Management

This was always an issue for me when I was teaching. I would be teaching a concept and be so involved with what I was doing that time would stand still. Well, only for me.

It is still the same way when I am home and working. I get involved in learning about a new concept that when I look at the clock, I cannot believe how much time has gone by.

2. Organization

When I was teaching, my desk usually looked like a tornado had come through. I knew where everything was located, (which amazed others at times when I could pull out exactly what they asked for or what I was looking for), but to the untrained eye, it looked unorganized.

I called it “organized chaos”!

At home, it is similar. I have piles of things (mostly paper) in different parts of my house. When I need to find a particular bill or form for school, I can find it. Every month or so, I go through my piles of paper and thin them down, file, shred or recycle them.

At this exact second, I am looking at piles I need to go through. When I had family visiting last week, I combined some piles and now I need to examine them to see what I can rid of, or file, or shred, or recycle.

3. Goals

I think this one is something that we all think of throughout the year, not only at New Years.

Throughout the years at school, we (the teachers) had to come up with three goals and how we would implement them. We had to write it all down and hand it in to our principal.

Many years my goals were similar, although I would word them a little differently each time. As a teacher, my goals revolved around reading and math improvement, mostly. I would look for ways to improve the students’ abilities through manipulatives or the newest research. (Side note: the newest research is not so new if you teach long enough!)

My general goal was the same—improvement of reading and math skills—but I tried to use different methods to reach those goals.

In my life, and in everyone’s life, we have goals. It may not be things that we verbalize all the time, but they are always in the back of our minds.

New Year’s is the time of year that we seem to verbalize them or try to “stick to” them, but they really are with us all the time.

My goal to lose weight has been on my New Year’s Resolution list for decades, probably since I was 10 years old. Sad but true! But even as I would “break” that resolution each year by the middle of January, it did not mean that I did not think about it the rest of the year. It was always there in the back of my mind.

Another goal every year was to work out more regularly. Anyone out there have that as their resolution, every…single…year?

Does it go away when you do not fulfill it in January?

By the way, that is when the gyms see their highest attendance, the month of January. It slacks off in February. Basically, it is because we slack off in February.

4. Resolutions

My resolutions every year will be losing weight and working out more. That is a given!

My other resolutions are focused on my career. Last year at this time I was starting out creating my website www.figuringouttherest.com.  I was navigating my way through how to build a website from scratch. It took me months to finish with a lot of help from YouTube tutorials and Google.   

That was just the beginning of the many projects I wanted to start. I wanted to start freelance writing, become a copywriter, publish my second children’s book (which has already been written and illustrated), write articles for publications, make my blog a world-wide hit as I lost the weight that I originally planned to do with the blog, and just generally take over the world. No big whoop!

Resolutions! Goals! They are there to keep us aiming for something…anything…for if we did not have them, where would we be?

My point being, that it does not matter how old you are, at what station in life you are at presently, or what occupation/career you are currently in.

Goals…resolutions…dreams…hopes, whatever you want to label them, that does not matter. What matters is having them, striving to achieve them, admitting failures, re-figuring them, and trying once again.  

For it is with the trying that keeps us going…to where and how far we do not know!

Wow, started to get a little bit deep there.

What are your goals? Resolutions? Dreams? Are you working towards them or are they still in the back of your mind? Maybe we can all achieve them, who knows? Happy New Year!