(10 minutes of writing anything and everything that pops into my head, as long as I keep writing.)
I have a lot of things swirling around in my head today, which makes it difficult to focus on one thing to write about. I've just been a butterfly of activity all day, going through my email and getting it managable, poking around the UUA website, even doing some actual work-related work.
I feel like I have a lot going on in my head right now, no doubt because I've been doing a lot of reading and thinking, but also because I'm really trying to get a handle on how to put my life on track. It makes me wonder about transitions and starting points and beginnings and cycles. I have tried many times the New Year's Resolution thing, with any number of goals in mind. Never seemed to work, however, and other times I've had little success with starting things up and keeping them sustained.
It makes me wonder what it is about August that seems like such a natural for me, for new beginnings. Why August? It's hot, it's the middle of summer, we're heading into fall and then winter, two classic "endings" in terms of seasons and things that go on. Summer and spring are the times of activity. Fall is active, too, but then it slows down into Winter.
I suspect, though, that it has to do with a clock that has to do with the seasonal change only peripherally. School started and ended, historically, because of planting and harvest. So now, in August, I feel as though the new school year is looming, even though I haven't been in school for years and I have no children who are preparing for school. But I wonder if my psyche is primed to view the beginning of school, the beginning of the school year, which now is also the beginning of the church year for me since I've become active in a church, is the beginning of a cycle.
In August.
Last year, I started with my weight-loss program that involves eating better, exercising more, and counting calories. I didn't start all these things up at once. Indeed, when I first started, I was truly resistent to exercising, and had a good amount of success losing weight without exercising. If you eat fewer calories than you burn, you'll lose weight. Slowly, perhaps, and sometimes painfully (as you pass up that chocolate cake or the apple pie), but it will happen.
Now, with the beginning of another August, I need to renew my commitment to my weightloss program -- a program almost entirely focused on me and my needs. I also need to work on adding elements to the Robyn Regimen, in terms of career and skill development. Working on ways to start moving in a different, more fulfilling and meaningful direction.
Fulfillment and meaning are not the same thing, of course, but they are connected. I'm not sure at this point what sort of meaningful and fulfilling career I want to have, but I know that it needs to involve service to other people. I want to make a difference in people's lives, somehow, whether on a personal one-on-one level, or at a higher level in terms of management or politics or ministry. It's a tricky challenge, and one that's going to take time. I think what I need most at this point is a plan. And in order to create a plan, I need time. And time is, unfortunately, in short supply.
Figures.
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