Every year, I say it and I hear it: I can’t believe Christmas has come and gone already.
But this year, while August crept up on me without a freaking sound ~ the past four months have dragged on for like…an eternity. Oh, what a long strange trip it’s been, Internet.
There are stories I tell you. Those are my stories. The ones I have all the proper permissions for. And then there are the stories I’m not at liberty to share. Some of those are also my stories. But in those stories, I play a varied role. In some, I am the supporting cast – there to hold up the protagonist, to provide comic relief, and to lend an ear, a shoulder, a hand. In some of them I am neither hero nor supporting cast. In some stories, I am something else entirely.
There are stories I share, and stories I don’t. There are stories I tell myself, and stories I won’t even recognize as stories until the epilogue comes much, much later. Some stories help us grow, and some stories become like shrapnel, a painful little reminder lodged in the flesh of happy memories.
But each story has a chance to become a lesson. And the most important thing I’ve learned this year is that it’s all too easy for the stories we tell in this new performance art of a life too-connected to take the focus away from the now, the present, the here. It’s all too easy for a whole year to slip by in the blink of an eye.
Scott and I have been talking a lot lately about resolutions and what twists and turns the story of our life together will hold. If we’re going to make them, what they should be, how we fell short in our own minds this year, and how we’d like to do better. And I do. This year, I want to do everything better. But more than better, I want to do everything intentionally. Too often lately, life is so hectic, I forget to pay attention to the wonderful parts of my every day.
I want to enjoy every moment of my year. I want to live intentionally, and love intentionally, and work intentionally. I want to make, and savor the five minute phone calls with friends when Delilah falls asleep in the car and I can finally focus on the person on that other end. I want to luxuriate longer in the cooking of a meal for my family, or the giving of a hug to my child. I want to listen to my parents stories without wondering if I left my cell phone in the car. I want to enjoy the joy of the writers I get to syndicate just a little more. I want to smooth out that rough idea out just a little longer with the brilliant women I get to call friends and colleagues on this big bad internet. And I want to fall back in love with the journey that is my career. I want to step back and be grateful for the promise and possibility that awaits me on the other side of every studio executive’s door, every producer’s office, every set of director’s notes, rather that irritably, anxiously, gunning for the future.
The pace of the world we live in throws me for a loop on a regular basis. I get caught up in the inertia of it all too easily and forget to often that life is something we create, not something that happens to us.
Also, Lindsey shared this video with me a couple of days ago and I thought it was pretty funny.
Hope you and yours had a wonderful holiday.
4 Replies to “Turn, Turn, Turn”