It's December

I'm not ready.

How is it December AGAIN?

I am feeling totally scattered and as always not ready for the holidays.

I actually received one of those family holiday cards (with photos of the kids and parents) on November 20 this year. Insert exploding head emoji. I can barely get myself dressed on a good day and here are people sending out Xmas cards in mid-November. Time to run back to the comfort of being a C+ person!

The older I get the more reckoning I have to do with my limited capacity and my finite energies. Everyday I must take real stock of what I can actually achieve that day and what will have to get moved - yet again - to tomorrow. This includes making more deliberate choices with my time. Do I decorate the house? Do I send out cards? Or, do I try to squeeze in more writing time instead?

In the Life Worth Living book I am reading, the authors posit that:

Life isn’t a series of crises calling for Heroic Moral Deeds. Most of the time, it’s a series of small, seemingly insignificant decisions and nondecisions. It’s made up of habits and assumptions and incremental changes. The shape of who we are and how we live isn’t like the Stonehenge. It’s not made by stacking a few massive rocks on top of another. It’s built up over time, brick by brick.

Habit. Brick by brick. Small incremental change. A daily practice.

I see this with my writing. I know that it’s the continued building of the habit that will get me there. I know that choosing this, will mean that I have to let other things go.

So to that end - I am heading into 2024 with the goal of building a new habit for writing Book People. Finding a practice that I can integrate into my daily life so that I am able to tackle it. I am enlisting the help of my writing mentor because lord knows I need the help.

Yesterday I jokingly (but also sort of not joking) told my husband that I have 8.5 pages of material for Book People. It means I’m only 9 years away from being done! I’ll get there eventually. Brick by brick.

I guess it means you’re not getting a family Xmas card from me.

And I guess… that’s totally ok.