On New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day each year, I sit down
with my journal and look back over the ending year at what went well and what
didn’t. Then I decide what I want more and less of in the coming year and plan
ways to make those goals happen. The year seldom goes the way I’ve envisioned,
of course, because of all the unexpected things that will come up, but at least
I have a plan. It’s easier to adjust an existing plan than to keep coming up
with one from scratch all year long. This is a tradition I’ve come to rely on
at each year’s end.
Only, at the end of 2013, I was laid flat with pneumonia—and
on top of that, I couldn’t read or write because the illness or one of the meds
I took for it made my eyes and head hurt so. Consequently, the year ended and
2014 came in without my usual stock-taking and goal-setting. I’m only getting
to it now in mid-January as I dig out from under the piled-up correspondence
and backlog of work that had to be put off while I was sick.
I’m not sure that mid-January isn’t a better time to do the yearly
inventory and plan anyway. It seems to me that I’m taking a more realistic look
at things than I usually do in the optimistic, holiday glow. One of the main
things I’ve fixated on is the need to revamp the systems in my life. You know,
those sets of habits and schedules that keep daily life functioning and keep us
on track with our deadlines, obligations, and ambitions.
I hadn’t really revamped mine after I began publishing
novels. I adjusted to cover the demands of the publisher to promote my books
and the need to travel more on book tour—as a poet, those had not been a
necessity. I adjusted to meet the frequent deadlines, another thing that had
not been a part of my life as a poet. No one cares when your next book of
poetry is done. You write your first and try to get it published for years. Then
you write the next, and even if one or more publishers are waiting for it, they
aren’t expecting it at any time in the near future. I had deadlines with the
grant cycles, of course—poets live off grants much more than off book sales,
which are usually miniscule—but my life in the past few years had essentially
been transformed into something wild and alien to the life I lived before my
first novel won a national novel competition. And every year, I tried to make
it work better without making fundamental changes to the way I was doing things
in my daily life—because that’s hard and takes much time and thought. That
basically meant adding more and more work expectations and watching everything
else in my life fall away.
While ill, I had time to really think about all of this, albeit
in a dazed, doped-up, miserable way. And I came to the conclusion that it’s not
working well for me. Oh, the novel-writing/publishing part is going well
because that’s where all of my energy and time have been focused, but most of the
things I did to provide stress relief, enrich my family and home, and basically
create a happy, healthy life had fallen by the boards from lack of time.
This is not the first time I’ve come to this kind of
discovery. I’m a quadruple Scorpio, and my base tendency is to go into
something with all my energy and focus. I’m usually left picking up pieces and
making major adjustments later. Passion is the great theme of my life, and balance
is the great lesson I have to learn—again and again in new ways.
In 2014, my aim is to focus more on balance in my life. I
intend to keep the energy and forward progress in my career as a mystery writer,
but I want to restructure the basic systems of my life to make it possible for
me to include more non-work time with my husband and family—Ben’s seen plenty
of me only because he’s spent all his vacation time with me on tour—more
important health activities—exercise has been one of the important things to
fall by the wayside and I must find a way to eat healthier when on tour—and
more relaxation and de-stressing activities. (Microsoft Word’s autocorrect kept
trying to change “de-stressing” to “distressing.” What is it trying to tell
me?)
That means I have to look at the habits, schedule, and
priorities of my life in a different way and change them to keep what’s working
well and change what isn’t. It also means that all year I’ll be making
adjustments as I see that this or that part of the system isn’t working as well
as I thought it would. That’s the way such transformation happens. I’ve been through
this kind of thing before.
This is not a New Year’s resolution. I’m looking at systems
rather than specific goals—for example, how to set up a system to eat healthy and
exercise while traveling rather than a goal of losing so many pounds. I’m looking
at how to make it easier to do the things I want to do this year for a
healthier, more balanced life.
Now that we’re in the middle of the first month of the new
year, how are you doing with your New Year’s resolutions, goals, or plans? Are
you on track? Have you decided to revamp them? to pitch them? And is anyone
else out there always having to relearn this “balance” lesson?
