I love this time of year and I also hate it a little bit. I love that the new year brings with it resolutions, new attitudes and that it all just feels so brand new. It feels unspent and like you have a clean new slate to fill up with all kinds of good things.

I hate this time of year because it’s so cold and bleak here. The landscape is usually white and frosty, the trees are bare. The days are gray and the majority of the day (when it’s sunny out) is spent inside.

Today I returned back to the real world of working and going to school and within the first twenty minutes of being at my desk I read an email I received that normally would have upset me and threatened to shatter the vacation serenity that I possessed. I hate getting emails about things that I need to do that I’m already aware of but aren’t needed for X amount of weeks or months. If I had a habit of forgetting things like this then I could certainly understand the reminders, but I don’t.

Instead of getting all bothered, annoyed and grumpy though I took a step back and realized that it is simply this person’s need. It was this person’s OCD. It was their need to be right and point out some imaginary and perceived flaw that didn’t exist. It wasn’t about me at all. So I simply pointed out that I hadn’t forgotten, when the item was good until (next month) and that I’d make sure it was done by the end of the week. And then I did it today.

In that moment I realized that this isn’t my forever. It is that person’s forever and that’s kind of sad. But it’s not mine. I don’t know how long it will be mine, but I do know that eventually it won’t be mine any longer and in that I took great comfort and was able to let the annoying email slide away.

I think my main resolution (and there is certainly a long list of things that I’d like to accomplish this year) will be to hold onto that vacation serenity. That freshness you get when you go away and come home and have to go back to monotony. I want to wrap it around myself like a big teflon blanket so that everyone’s negativity just slides off.

This will be a very hard resolution to keep but one that will certainly be well worth the effort.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 1:03 pm and is filed under Thought It Out Loud. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.