A New Year's Resolution

"Just because everything is different, doesn't mean anything has changed..."

I have remarked constantly in blog posts, and in general, about how different so much of my life has become over the course of this past year.

New stuff is all around me...
new schedules,
new challenges,
new surroundings.
Everything.

However as I sat here thinking about what to write, I came across that quote above and it struck me. I finally realized, on New Year's Eve, that regardless of everything that has transpired in 2011... nothing really has 'changed'.

Am I a different person then I was a year ago...? No, I don't think so, not really anyway. I laugh at the same things, I eat the same foods (sometimes to my detriment... OK most of the time it is to my detriment)... and I love the same people. My thoughts and feelings remain fairly consistent to who I believe myself to be. Some of my opinions may have softened throughout the course of the year, but the core of who I am and how I respond to others, is as it has always been. Nothing has changed.

All that has happened is that I have made a year's worth of mistakes while learning a year's worth of knowledge. Some of it I have always understood, even if only in an abstract way. This past year I have had the opportunity to fully experience the truth of it all.

I've learned that:

* Happiness really does have more value then any amount of money.
* Change is far scarier in your imagination then it is in your reality.
* If you don't stand up for your own feelings, you loose all respect for yourself, and so will everyone else.
* How much I enjoy an activity depends about 95% on the people that I choose to do it with.
* Not everyone thinks before they speak, which makes it even more important for me to think before I act.
* The happiness of those I love is more important than my own, but if I'm not happy... they won't be either.
* Creating something myself means more to me then spending money on it.
* Sometimes the most surprising friendships are the most rewarding.
* Listening to someone talk is different then just hearing the words come out of their mouth.

All I have to do to be satisfied with the course my life has taken, is to stop thinking about what I want it to be and start looking at what it is. It's a life filled with equal parts of frustration and laughter. One with high points, and low valleys - but mostly, it is a life that consists of middle ground, ordinary, routine days.

Average days, in which not much really changes. I'm OK with that, in fact... I'm more than OK with it. I am going to make it a point, a goal, to embrace my 'everydays'. To find joy and serenity in the little pieces that would normally get overlooked - walking the dog, pizza dinners, skinned knees and even...yes... buying snow pants. I think that is going to be my New Year's Resolution - to have as many ordinary, frustrating, laugh-filled days as 2012 can handle.

Let that be my wish for you as well....

that your mornings be greeted with bedhead hair and cereal with milk...
afternoons filled with a 9-5 grind, but a happy place to drive home too...
nights of favorite TV re-runs and bedtime kisses from those you love most...

and a year full of different happenings and altered paths... where very little really changes.