It's New Year's But It Feels Like July 1

The upside of cracking open a new notebook each month is there really is no difference from one month to the next. I have the same experience on January 1 as I do July 1. It's like Anne Lamott tweeted earlier this morning, “Another word for New Year's Day is "Thursday." 

My notebooks are a variation on a practice I read about in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing down the Bones. I buy a different notebook each month and fill it up with my thoughts and observations. I also note my runs and tape my race bibs in there; so far, I’m planning for January to hold my Rogue 10K bib, February to hold my Austin Half Marathon bib, and a fall month to hold my tenth marathon bib. Today was supposed to have my Commitment Day 5K bib pinned in, but the outdoor portion was cancelled due to weather; always a good idea to keep Central Texas drivers off the road in a wintry mix.

Last night, I started reading through my notebooks from 2014. I usually pour a glass of red wine and settle in for a few hours. I made it through April. I didn’t want to read any further. Not because it was such a horrible year, although it did include my dad passing away from complications due to Alzheimer’s, but that I was tired of looking back. Most of what I worried and wrote about didn’t happen and if it did, it didn’t happen like I thought it would. A lot of my problems had solutions I never imagined. Wonderful solutions. I was ready to fill new blank notebooks and put 2014 to bed.

If I have a resolution, it’s a continuing one, to consistently keep the commitments I make to myself. I leafed through a 2014 calendar that I unpinned from my wall today. I crossed a line through the date squares and recorded the miles I ran or a strength or cross training sessions I completed in them. Some months and weeks were better than others were. I’m sure if I looked back at my notebooks those squares would correlate to entries that bragged about weight loss and productive workdays. Commitment in one area usually dominoes into other areas. So, I kept my promise to run today despite the weather and eat a bowl of black-eyed peas and greens. It's Thursday and I still have thirty days to go in my Grumpy Cat notebook.