Shaking off the Funk and Looking Ahead
As 2008 comes to a close I am thinking about my plans and ideas and wishes for the coming year. I really love New Year’s Day because it represents yet another chance to get it right. On that day we stand poised on the brink of the freshness of life. Everything is new. We walk around smiling and greeting strangers with a hearty, “Happy New Year!” and positivity just seems to float in the air. The year 2008 was not a banner year for me, and as it drags on out of here I give it a kick in the butt, wipe its dust off of my feet and turn towards the new year with a renewed sense of hope and possibility.
I was in quite a funk last week–quite a dark one and it took awhile to shake myself out of it. Sometimes it’s so much easier to just give in to those feelings of hopelessness and despair when they creep in along the edges. I was finding few positive things to feel hopeful about, so I began to allow myself to sink low. Even for those days while I was wallowing in self-pity I knew that there was a better choice, but I was tired of the frustration of trying to help myself and failing time and again. But I finally came to the conclusion that if I did not want to end up in a mental health facility in a padded room, then I needed to get a grip on myself and snap out of it. Yesterday I heard someone say, “My best days are ahead of me.” but I know that my best time is right now. In this moment I am all that I will ever be. I embrace the fact that I have not accomplished all that I set out to this year. I acknowledge that I have wasted a lot of valuable time in my life, but I am also confident in the knowledge that God will neither leave me nor forsake me. I know that I have the strength to get through any circumstance that I find myself in and prevail in the end because I am still here. Every challenge that has come before me in the past I have overcome, and so I feel confident as I move forward.
Despite the fact that I said that I would not set any goals this year, to shake myself up and get my creative juices flowing, I decided to write a list that would encompass my, “Money no object, pie in the sky dreams and wishes for 2009.” The following is a list of the things that I would love to do if I had no limitations whatsoever in no particular order:
- Learn to fly an airplane
- Publish a book
- Build my dream house
- Travel to Barbados, Italy, France, Niger, Sudan and Australia
- Visit my family and friends in Oregon and California
- Learn to play the piano
- Have a gallery showing of my paintings
- Attend cooking school
For today I will embrace each moment and simply do the next thing that comes up. I am grateful for my health, my (relative) sanity 
, the talents that I was blessed with, my children, my family and friends and my faith. With all of these things intact, 2009 can throw whatever she will at me, or bring me all of the desires of my heart. I am here and I am ready.
We all experience a type of ‘funk’ at different times of our lives. I no longer have any little ones to take of in my life and I wonder what to do with this ‘empty time’. I picked up the latest Essence magazine and read of the entries that were written about what it meant to them about the President-elect and what can we do as a people to support him. After reading the magazine, I felt I could do anything that I wanted to do and thank God that I am still around to do it. I plan to volunteer my services to several causes I am concerned about. I plan to fix my knitting/spinning mojo. I plan to attend the MSWF this year and hopefully I will run into you and we can talk.