1/06/2022
1/06/2022
Dear Friends in Christ,
My family has developed a new tradition on New Year’s Day of gathering around the fire pit in the backyard and reminiscing over the past year; both good and bad - lessons learned, joys experienced, sorrows shared, and things accomplished. We follow this up with hopes and expectations for the coming year. It evolved from a pre-covid tradition of taking the dogs for a hike, followed by a trip to Lazy Dog to sit around the fire on their patio and share appetizers. New Year’s Day is our dog Toby’s birthday, and this was our way of “treating” him with dinner at a restaurant! However, this year he had hurt his back and couldn’t walk far and I found myself missing the hike, so I guess it just gave us a perfect excuse to do something we wanted to do and call it tradition.
Last year, because of the pandemic we weren’t able to go to Lazy Dog, and so after hiking round Contra Loma Reservoir we had appetizers and snacks round the fire pit in our backyard, and thus a new tradition was born.
After the past couple of years and no end to the current state of things in sight, it was noticeably harder to come up with hopes and expectations for 2022. Just getting through it seemed to be the order of the day. Which is why a blog by Gretchen Schmelzer that showed up on a friend’s Facebook page seemed the answer. The premise of Schmelzer’s piece was that our current experience of pandemic exhaustion, anxiety, and uncertainty mean that we feel helpless and powerless to change anything. And while big changes are beyond our capacity right now, small seemingly insignificant changes can go a long way to reversing these feelings. So the author suggested a goal of 22 for ’22 – small intentions and activities that we can repeat and cross of a list, or one small practice you repeat 22 times. Instead of the big life goals and ambitious resolutions people make this time of year, we focus on small accomplishments and gradual movement for 2022. When I dug deep I realized that I want to try to write, and so I have committed to 22 minutes of writing I-haven’t-yet-figured-out-how many-times a week. I’ll let you know how it goes! And in case you too might need some inspiration, here is the blog: