Cindy Lange-Kubick: Take time for yourself this year
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How long does it take a year to go from blank slate — empty, unfettered, unencumbered, unnavigated, limitless, boundless, spotless, exciting, intoxicating, freeing, invigorating, inspiring, motivating, new — to mere numbers on a desk calendar covered with coffee stains and missed dental appointments?
Is this still a New Year?
A new year, even?
Do we still have hope our fortunes will rise in 2008?
A Top 10 Year?
Everyone is rooting for us.
Target. JC Penney. The Gym. Your Bulk Mail Wannabe Financial Adviser.
Organize your paperwork! De-clutter your basement! Stack those ornaments! Invest!
From the glossy sections and the junk mail pile, they’re practically begging us to succeed.
Sleep on these new sheets, wrap up in those cozy towels, wear these boots, fight that flab, you can DO it, we can help.
Help. We all need it.
Resolve alone won’t suffice. A week in — nine, 10, 11 days gone — and resolve melts like a south Texas snowfall.
Now is the time for wisdom, perspective.
The inner plastic storage tub.
The Bowflex of past experience, not available at 60 percent-off January sale prices, to lead us.
Live long enough and you know what it takes to come out the back end of a year better, firmer, happier, saner.
It’s more than grocery shopping when you’re full, flossing after meals, clipping coupons, cardio.
It’s not listening to the sorts of people who tell you not to sing in the car or dance in the street — at your age, really! — or wear spandex or show cleavage or walk around with those gawdawful sequins on your rear pockets, if that’s what revs your engine.
It’s accepting that comfortable shoes don’t have to be ugly, but quite often are.
It’s accepting that no matter your demographic, there will be people who look right through you, as if you were nothing but air or a billboard for Levitra, because you are too old, too young, wrong sex, wrong color, wrong size.
And that there are some people who will see you as the Heidi Klum of their universe.
And knowing that, those are the people you hold onto for dear life.
A good year is caring so much you bawl like a baby, bite your fingernails until they bleed, lie awake nights.
A good year is not waiting to be one size smaller.
Remembering to close the menu when you know what you want.
Shutting off your phone when you don’t want to talk.
It’s getting over.
Letting go.
Moving on.
It’s realizing patience is a virtue.
One you may never have.
And that it’s not too late to cultivate another.
Courage, perhaps. Humility. Kindness.
A good year is figuring out you’ll never have it figured out.
That book that’s going to change your life this year? Go ahead, read it. Lose yourself in the self-help aisle. Roll around with inspiration.
Me, all I know is too much grapefruit gives me canker sores, and when I try to carry too many bags from my car to my house to save myself another trip, something always ends up broken on the ground.
And that there’s nothing better than balance, even if it doesn’t sell books.
A year is a gaudy necklace from the jewelry counter at Shopko.
Cheap and sparkly and breakable. Good and not so good and really rotten days strung together with a lot of ordinary holding it together.
It’s our time. The Earth taking us on a ride. Slipping us around the sun, so fast our heads can’t begin to spin.
And we reduce it all to 52-week planners.
We’ve cleaned our slates, started anew with our storage tubs, our discounted Egyptian cotton sheets, our financial goals and our 5-pound hand weights.
Onto the next trip.
Onto another 365 days we can’t have back.
That will never be on sale again at any price.
My advice?
Shop early. Stay late.
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
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Find the joy in the mundane.
Look forward to the smell of s spring day, the first tulips and robin sightings, the smell of a charcoal grill.
Go watch a bunch of kids play baseball
Dig through your records, photos and take a trip down memory lane.
Drive to a part of town you never go to and get out, walk around and explore it.
Sit on your porch, in the garage or somewhere else during a thunderstorm, then go and jump in the puddles and streams afterwards.
Eat lots of meals........ outside.
Enjoy as many daybreaks and sunsets as you can ...outside.
Experience more, accomplish less.
Savor, not solve.
Be, not do.
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sj wrote on January 11, 2008 6:04 pm: