The Revolution of Change

As a newspaper and magazine writer and columnist I have always thought blogging to be a natural progression for me. In every inspired locale: a long airplane journey where hours are mistaken for days in terms of what I cram unrealistically into my carry-on bag to accomplish on the flight, the beach tent before the kids come running back from the surf demanding food and kicking sand all over my thoughts, the deafening home alone silence hindered by my restlessness to do a million things at once, I scribble two or three lines meant to launch me into blogdom, a false start fleeting and abandoned as the outside world beckons.

We-hellll, this year is gonna be different (apart from the repeated activity of recycling last year’s list of revolving aspirations by crossing off the old year and writing in the new number). I am happy to announce that with this writing, I thee blog. I am now free to bask in the smashing success of fulfilling my first New Year’s resolution. From. About. Four. Year’s. Ago.

What a shock it was to discover that I am already a blogger and have been since 2010! Yes, I remember it well.  Oh January, my January, when I engage in my annual ritual, the one where the Earth completes a 365 day spin around the sun and my brain takes up temporary residency on the moon.

Armed with a cup of tea and a little tub of leftover Christmas fudge I have hidden from the children, I make a list as long as Neptune’s winter – lose weight, clean out loft, teach children not to swear, start blog… By evening time on the first day of the new year I am swiftly moving on to achieving the unachievable, attaining the unattainable and as for the unfathomable, well, let me just say ‘hot damn do I love to fathom’!

What is it about the promise of change that makes me want to abandon my cozy life of cluttered unproductivity and drag all nearby loved ones down with me to the depths of fault-facing hell in search of flawlessly-functioning heaven? It’s the POSSIBILITY that this time it might actually happen.

As a longstanding and erstwhile member of the ‘Fix Our Organizational Latencies Society’ (a.k.a. ‘FOOLS’), I am intermittently obsessed with straightening up, flying right and walking the straight and narrow, hypnotised by blindingly shiny new leaves turning over willy-nilly.

Hindsight being a wonderful tool for pointing out the foresight one should have had in the first place is rather inconveniently in short supply. So my resolutionary reality means that I spend countless hours perusing the tools by which to tame a mad woman: the titillating little blank squares of an empty calendar, the all-you-can-eat You Tube video platter of people who are seemingly already doing that which I aspire to, websites, forums and email reminders from said people, my not-in-this-lifetime ‘Vision Board’ and last year’s list of everything I didn’t do, but still want to do compounded by the current list of everything I want to do but probably won’t be able to do because of everything I didn’t do last year. And the year before that. And before that. Confessions of a serial serialist.

I think I must possess some sort of ‘delusion gland’ all porous and spongy soaking up a plethora of advice particularly that associated with numbers. According to various sources of various levels of credibility, it takes 21 or 28 or is it 30 days to form a new habit or break an old one. Based on my thoroughly haphazard internet search I have concluded that there are basically 12 tips for taking 8 steps toward 10 hints that involve 15 things to avoid when taking the 1,000 thingy challenge. The great news is that the end result will be a perfect yoga body thriving on fresh, organic, free-range meditation, a budget plan that will launch my husband and I into a balmy retirement where the water meets Shangri-La and an eye watering book deal to keep me writing into my dotage, wrinkle free.

And so, ‘Operation Uber Sort’ (or ‘Same Crap Different Year’) has begun! Wall charts have been designed, calendars filled, routines created, elaborate plans made scheduling myself and my family to the microsecond, shower 6:59 am, dress 7:02, breakfast 7:10, brush teeth 7:16. This, it must be noted, is a vast improvement on my normal morning when I arrive breathless at not-quite-on-time-o’clock bare hands struggling to pry open the day as the colossal weight of it threatens to shut on me.

Wheeee! Off we go into the wild blue new year. With the weight of my dirty little secret lifted from my shoulders, I am no longer the only non-blogging blogger in existence. Go me.

See you next week, or in 2018.