Happy 2021 Everyone! I have had “write a new blog post” on my to-do list for a very long time now. In fact, I’ve started countless posts in my head while on my (almost) daily walks but just haven’t managed to find the energy to actually write. Perhaps because I spend so much of my workday staring at a computer screen and had no desire to spend my evening the same way. Or perhaps it’s just sheer exhaustion from everything 2020. Either way, with a new year, I figure it’s probably time for a new post, although I know better than to resolve to post more often in 2021!
Speaking of New Year’s resolutions, I’ve really never been a fan. My own personal annual resolution is typically to not make any resolutions (making me one of the few people who actually manage to keep theirs!) All jokes aside though, setting grand New Year’s goals implies a level of control that few of us actually have. For example, living with Stage IV cancer, my biggest goal for 2020 was simply to still be here in 2021! (Although perhaps I should have been more specific, since by “being here” I didn’t actually mean exactly right here in my living room, since I can’t really go anywhere else due to the lockdown…) But no matter what goal-setting strategy I apply, I don’t have much control over how long my current treatment will keep working. And 2020 clearly showed us that there are a lot of other things we can’t control either. So perhaps those big, ambitious goals aren’t the way to go.
That being said, I do like the idea of taking time to reflect and trying to be better and do better but shouldn’t we be doing that more than just once a year? I guess there’s just something about starting a fresh calendar that makes us feel like it’s our big chance to do things differently than last year; or that it’s a clean slate, allowing us to imagine our ideal self and hopefully will that into being (although I’m starting to suspect that “really wanting it” isn’t quite enough as I’ve been trying to will 6-pack abs into being for years).
2020 made most of our worlds a whole lot smaller, so perhaps that is where we start – with the little things. Forget the clean slate, forget the fresh start, forget the massive list of big, hairy, ambitious goals for things you can’t actually control. Instead, just find one small thing – one small thing you can be grateful for today, or one small thing you can do today to be healthier, or one small act of kindness that you can do for someone else today. And let that be enough.
One not-so-small thing that I am grateful for today is that my treatment is still working and my cancer has been stable since I started treatment just over 17 months ago. I’m somewhat less grateful for having to spend part of my Christmas vacation having various radioactive substances injected into my body for the CT and bone scans that I have the pleasure of getting every 3 and 6 months respectively, but I am hopeful that the results will be a repeat of previous scan reports. And as I wait on those, I will be grateful that I was able to enjoy my mom’s traditional New Year’s “ollie bollen” while I go on another walk to try to burn off all of that delicious fried dough. And for today, that’s enough.
C is for Colleen 