Two weeks into the new year and yup, my resolutions have fallen by the wayside. But all hope is not yet lost.  There are still eleven and a half months to go. I’m not striving for perfection – that’s setting myself up for definite failure. I’d just like to see some growth this year from who I am now. Financially, I’d like my income to increase and debts to decrease. I’d like to have improved cardio, lose 10 pounds, and a few completed road races under my belt. I want next year’s health resolutions to include maintaining the new weight as opposed to yet again wanting to lose them!  I want to have (finally!) read through a long list of books and complete several pieces of writing. While my relationship with BBE is good, there is always room for growth to keep us going strong.

I revisited the Happiness Project I set up for 2016.  Like all those other blogs I found that talked about everyday people’s attempts at doing a Happiness Project, I too failed to keep at it.  I’m feeling the effects of that now: I’m not any happier than I was twelve months ago.  I’m going to give it another go for 2017.

Step #1: My 2017 Commandments

I thought about just using last year’s again to guide my actions for this year but in reading them, I didn’t really feel like they were what I needed for this year.  Maybe that’s why I didn’t go too far with last year: I didn’t have the right guiding principles.  I sought out guidelines that I thought would create the kind of year I wanted to reflect back on.  Some of them I worked in some quotations to really help guide my thinking and provide some solid structure.  Next step…

Step #2: Where to begin?

Last year’s plan had a theme for each month. I thought about just focusing on one theme for this year overall.  At first, I was thinking about “love”.  January would be love myself, February would be love BBE, and so on.  But I’m not feeling “love myself” right now.  It doesn’t seem to be the thread to connect together all I want to complete this year.  Then I thought about “growth” because it seemed a better fit for the goals and resolutions I’ve been contemplating.  What I’ve noted is that overthinking gets me nowhere. So rather than dwell on coming up with the *perfect* theme for the year, I’m going with what makes sense: getting started. Just doing these few things for the next two weeks would be major progress, so we’ll see what happens!

I’ve also been rethinking the idea of doing a “happiness project”.  Sure, I hope to achieve a happier state of mind but I’m not really sure that’s the end goal.  And I’ve also learned that by focusing solely on the end goal, I miss out on enjoying the steps along the way. So until I figure all this out, I’m going to be calling this an experiment.  I figure the best way for me to find the growth I’m desiring this year, I will need to do a lot of trial and error and questioning and testing and evaluating.

Cheers to the year ahead!