Pressing Pause

Ah, resolutions. This year, I have plenty of them.

Take the EPPP and get licensed as a Psychologist.
I am going to buy the study software TODAY.
Regularly back up my laptop.
I am so horrible about this.
Make pictures albums out of my digital photographs so that if they are all stolen again I can have hard copies.
If only I could figure out which company makes the best picture books?
Pay off my credit card debt.
Ugh.
Hire an accountant.
Double ugh.
Go visit my friends and family on the East Coast.
April?
Cook something new every week.
Geoff will enjoy this one....I hope.
Sign up for yoga.
This just seems like the right thing to do every time I walk past Yoga Source in Larchmont.
Party like a rockstar before I start making babies at some vague point in the future.
Already underway.

So, a friend of mine from high school recently posted something about the relative futility of New Years Resolutions on FB, and the idea of choosing a single word upon which to concentrate in the coming year rather than a specific behavioral goal. This idea appealed to me for several reasons. First, I am historically a kind of resolution-junkie. Living an academic lifestyle for all these years has bred a kind of cyclical nature to my motivation--I am generally exhilarated at the start of a semester as I promise secretly to myself that I will finally enact some magical organization strategy so that piles of paper don't swallow up my home and office and/or I will begin anew with some kind of running schedule that will erase inches off my waistline and minutes off my marathon personal record. In these fantasies, I will generally be a better version of myself...someone who never procrastinates, who always finds the silver lining, who always remembers birthdays...

Anyhow, these are clearly just visions that I generally fail to manifest. Until just a couple of years ago, I would almost constantly beat myself up for what I perceived to be these little daily failures. Then an amazing thing happened--my life kind of fell apart under my feet, I turned thirty, and somewhere in the midst of that I started being happy with who I am, even on my worst of days. I go to bed almost every day feeling like I did the best I could, and that is all that matters. So cliche, but just simply true.

So back to the idea of the one word. The idea of bringing some mindfulness to a single word that could go across different goals appealed to me. I started thinking about it before New Years. I thought about it while driving up through the green rolling hills of the central coast of California. I thought about it as we checked into a hotel that looked like a Grandmother's house. I thought about it while I tasted wine with good friends, and as I curled my hair for our night of revelry. I thought about it as we danced in the cold and my handsome husband pulled me close and kept me warm and kissed me at midnight. It started to come to me as I laid in the canopy bed next to fireplace in the wee hours of 1/1/11. PAUSE.

Being in the grandma hotel reminded me of something that has been missing from my life over the last few years since my Nana died. A couple of times each year, my ever-manic life would be put on pause when I went to visit. At her house, there was no cell service. No internet. My days with her were spent talking, cooking, cleaning, reading, playing cards, waiting for Jeopardy to come on TV...all the while surrounded in the vestiges of my childhood. Days moved slowly. My brain stopped racing when I was there. It was wonderful.

All that being said, I would probably go nuts if I was there all the time.  For those of you who know me, you are familiar with my semi-hypomanic existence. I am constantly multi-tasking. I send and receive, on average, about 150 emails per day. For most of 2010, I worked two full times jobs while planning my wedding. I am always moving or thinking about my next move. This seems maddening to most people I know, but it just comes kind of naturally to me and I am perfectly happy being very, very busy. However, I have discovered in the last year that I do not hit pause enough. Some of my greatest moments of regret from the last year were just small moments that resulted in medium mistakes when I rushed to make a decision on something(s) and did not take pause to think through the repercussions.

Given these regrets, my resolution to have a year of mindfulness around the word PAUSE. My mechanism for this resolution is going to be this blog. I am going to challenge myself to press pause more often. Some days that may mean taking time to relax and do nothing, other days it may mean taking pause before making a decision.

I started this process yesterday, by taking pause on starting the blog. At first, I thought it might be a lame idea. I brought up the one-word idea at brunch after jumping into the icy Pacific ocean (not good to pause before that kind of thing, you just need to go forth screaming). Someone at the table who may or may not be my husband suggested the word "nudity" as my theme. I realized that others might think my little mindfulness project is silly, and I paused. Do I really care if people think its silly? Happily, I discovered at the end of my pause that no, I don't care. I think it will be a good experiment. Plus, just the process of writing about it has made me pause multiple times today, which is a good thing already.