Not ready yet, but I’m on my way

Janus: God of beginnings, passages, and endings (Vatican photo)

It’s a week before New Year’s Eve. I’m not ready but I’m on my way!

This holiday season is easily the most social for me in the past 3 years combined. It’s not about saying yes to any dress, nor does it involve me fussing about food and bevvies for the company. 

No one’s coming over.

I, however, am going out. No one cares whether I don the season’s gay apparel as long as I arrive with my sociable smile and my natural curiosity to catch up and to chat with known and new friends.

I do not anticipate extreme food follies nor a life-changing gong at the turn of the clock on December 31. My steps to more health and clarity in the new year started in July.

That’s when I compacted 12 banker’s boxes full of papers into 8 and then I managed my book collections using a variant of the Konmari ‘does it spark joy’ method.

The stuff sparked memories, as anyone rummaging through their past knows. I had proof of who I was and also who I once upon a variety of times aspired to become. The process of reintroducing myself to my current realities continues this week as I sort to find the bits in pantries, vanities and bookshelves that can be either released or realized going forward.

Contrary to the urgings in my inbox, my hours between socializing will not see me:

• Compile lists of Top 10 anything – not blog posts, trends to watch, predictions, books I should read or I think you must read.
• Craft resolutions
• Carve goals into stone

Inventory taking is indeed long overdue, but in this year’s gift of time before outside work resumes again, I WILL:

• Clear the space for good ideas, things, work and people to enter my life
• Clean so that I am forced to touch and tidy all my possessions and then marvel at the sparkle.
• Choose what I want to keep and then to steadfastly donate or discard the rest. I’m aided in this mission with a thrift store down the block and our building’s communal give-away table down the hall where my neighbours can share, take and enjoy anonymously if they like.

I hope as superstar Shania Twain sings: Life’s About to Get Good! I’m hopeful as it is one of her career comeback tunes, we are both Canadian women and Shania’s name is taken from an Ojibwa phrase meaning: “I’m on my way”.