Thinking about 2012

On Resolutions
I suck at New Year's Resolutions. There's just something about the whole concept that sends my personality into militant revolt. "Do NOT tell me what to do!"

So, no. Not gonna even try this year.

The one and only thing I am vowing to (attempt to) do this year is to keep a journal. I used to do this regularly and I don't know why I stopped. I think part of it is that it's sometimes just too difficult to probe all those dark places and find ways to express those feeling with words. Sometimes that's necessary, but often it feels like I'm just hanging out and enjoying the whole ugly morass.

Recently I saw this idea for "index card journaling." You create a lovely crafty box, fill it up with lovely crafty index cards (one for each day of the year), and every day you jot down something that was significant about that particular day. Way too complicated (and crafty) for me. But I like the concept.

I have a pile of empty journals that I purchased just because they were too pretty to leave at the store, so I plan to use one of those. And hopefully by the end of the year I'll have a journal filled with memories of significant events, even if it's only a record of the first heavy snowfall of the year or a particularly wonderful movie.

On Changes
I have become aware of a character flaw that I am going to work at changing. Not a resolution...just a concentrated effort. :)

I have realized that I become defensive when criticized. Not that I don't like to be corrected. In fact, I like to know when I've done something wrong so I can correct it. BUT I can't accept the correction without also justifying it, usually in a manner that comes across as defensive.

"Yes, I was wrong, but let me explain to you why..."

Maybe I need to internally process the 'why' in order to correct the behavior. But the person offering the correction doesn't need to hear it.

Learning to say "Yes, I was wrong" PERIOD is going to be very difficult. It kinna makes me grind my teeth just to think about it. It's hard to accept that people will draw their own conclusions as to the end of that sentence. "Yes, she was wrong because she is....stupid...or incompetent...or lazy...or whatever." But isn't there something noble in that? In movies or books, the heroes are often the characters who allow people to draw their own assumptions - even if means false accusations or imprisonment or lost relationships or other vile things. And, um, isn't that what Jesus did when he was accused and tortured and crucified?

Not that I mean to say that I'll become a hero or a martyr or whatever if I correct this character flaw. But I think it's a trait that is worth cultivating.

On Blogging
Will I be blogging more regularly in 2012? I don't know. Maybe.

Over the past few weeks, I've thought about shutting down this blog, or at least making it password restricted. But then I log on to discover certain comments that remind me that there is some reason for this blog, though I don't fully understand what it is.

For example, in September 2007 I wrote this post in which I shared a poem from a book that belonged to my grandmother. In December, four years after the fact, I received this comment on that post:

"Pearl Bash Heckel [the author of the poem] was my next-door neighbor when I was a little girl. I have the fondest memories of her and her husband, Albert. They were like grandparents to me, as mine had died years earlier...I remember calling them Nana and Baba."

Ok, maybe the commenter was just using my blog to promote her own book of poetry, as evidenced by the rest of what she wrote. But still...don't comments like that make your heart warm and fuzzy? It's like this invisible thread connecting my grandmother (who I miss desperately, all the time) and me and a stranger. And it reminds me how small the world can be, and how interconnected everything really is.

Happy New Year
And with that, I wish a most happy new year filled with all the wonderful things to everyone who may wander by here. :)