Thursday, January 05, 2006

Resolutions - Everyone's Doin' It

SO this past two years I've spent a lot of time sleeping, or laying, or generally feeling like if I moved at all I might empty out the entirety of my inner organs into the nearest round, washable object. And whle it's increased my ability to pretend everything is quite fine and I feel quite normal despite the pain radiating from my every joint or the feeling I may spew at any moment - it's not been too fun.

And this makes me mad, actually. At myself, at my body - at everything that's just not right. And while I can't FORCE my body to be healthy, and while I know there are some things that are just plain out of my control right now, stuff I have to just trust my doctors to watch over and take care of - I can certainly treat myself better. So that's my resolution.

THIS year? Healthy. I cannot remember the last time I felt good for an extended period of time and that is now my goal. If I feel crappy this year it will be for situations totally out of my control, and even then I'm going down fighting. And I'm not just doing the whole join a gym thing, or cut out chocolate as entire meals. I'm COMMITTING. To HEALTH. Mental, physical, spiritual.

So that means:

1. Regular trips to the gym and actually eating ALL five servings of fruits and veggies everyday.

2. Take time to center myself, to be present in the moment and celebrate all the days I feel and believe are special in ways I have always wished and hoped to.

3. Find books I'm interested in and take the time to sit and enoy them regularly.

4. Start my Urban Saints series of paintings.

5. Learn a new skill - maybe Spanish, maybe Irish Step dancing. I haven't decided. Maybe both.

6. Learn to say "no." and not feel guilty about it. No waiting to cut back until I'm overwhelmed and parsing out hours to live, but just being able to say "Yeah, I don't have time, but thank you. I'm booked doing things that make me happy."

I think that's enough. A good start. I've just reached the point where I know I have a good life - an amazing husband, a beautiful apartment in an awe-inspiring city, a creatively challenging job with fantastic people - and I'm not wasting one more second feeling too tired or too sick to enjoy any of it. I refuse to - and it starts NOW!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Re: resolution #4
I'd like to buy one, please. I am intrigued at how these sound...

~m said...

Ha. I'm doing portraits of people in our neigborhood and in our lives here - matching them with the appropriate saint symbolism in the portraits. It's the whole "Sacred People in Unsacred Places" thing. Recognizing that the people you see everyday are within themselves deities; sacred, holy.

Anonymous said...

You know I'm obsessed with saints, right? And nuns to a smaller degree. These sound awesome!

~m said...

I'm making a book out of them when I'm done - you just eard yourself a job writin gthe profiles and prayers!