Like a lot of introverts, the thought of going out and braving the drunken crowds on New Year’s Eve fills me with dread. For a long time now, the way I celebrate is at home, alone, with a journal and a pen, reflecting on the year just gone, and dreaming for the one about to start. This year, for the first time, I also actively worked on goals I would like to achieve and projects I would like to work on.
One of life’s big (and recurring) lessons for me is the one Robert Burns wrote as
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley
Or as we better know it: The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”
Now awry is a word with negative connotations, but a plan deviating from the expected course need not necessarily be something to wring our hands over.
Last year, I became a journalist. If someone had ever told me I would be a journalist, I would have scoffed at them and Harry the Self-Invalidating Hamster would have stuck his pointy little rodent-nose and ticklish whiskers into my ear and laughed long and annoyingly squeakily.
Becoming a journalist was not in my plans. Ever. It was a very big surprise to be honest. Thanks to the (admittedly self-serving) constant prodding of someone to apply for a journalist position that was advertised, I applied for the job to get the person off my back, to shut them up, telling them as I had no experience at all there wasn’t a chance in hell I would get the position. Well it appeared that hell wanted to prove me wrong, and as I went through the interview processes I started to really want the job.
And here I now am, working as a journalist for a couple of days a week on a rural community newspaper … and it is one of the best things that has happened to me.
I love my job. I LOVE my job. It’s the first job in my entire life I’ve been able to say that about, and so passionately. I meet the best people, and I get to WRITE for a living.
So here I have wasted four paragraphs deviating from the plan of this blog post, which was to announce that my Word for 2015 is ‘Become’.
I may be a few years behind the eight-ball, but apparently choosing a Word For the Year is quite the trendy thing to do. Now I didn’t just pull a word out of … a hat and declare ‘that will do’. Being the perfectionist I am I had to really work at it, and to help me along I used a free five-day ‘email course’, available through Susannah Conway’s site.
While there I also downloaded her Unraveling the Year Ahead 2015 workbook to help me with goal planning and I printed it in A5 and stuck it in my Goals Filofax, but this post is already over-wordy and that’s a post for another day.
Why ‘Become’? It works in many areas for me. Friendship, for one. Becoming a better friend and becoming friends with new people. Becoming a better journalist, becoming a writer … I see writing, as friendship, as a never-ending process of growth. And this is a major reason for resurrecting this blog … writing practice.
Becoming financially responsible is one of my major goals this year, as is becoming more mindful, meditating more, and getting back into yoga. Becoming more organised is on my agenda every year, particularly in regards to the home front, unfortunately. Becoming able to use my beautiful expensive camera on its manual settings and becoming a MUCH better guitarist are also on my goals list.
I intend recording my progress along these different paths here on the blog throughout the year, and I hope you can follow along with me, and perhaps tell me what your goals are and how they are going.
When I think of the words become and becoming, I have a visceral feeling of expansion from my centre in all directions, of growth, of aiming to reach potential. To me it’s a beautiful word.
Do you have a word for 2015? If you don’t, what words do you think would work for you this year?
❤