I have found that both a blessing and a curse of having a blog is that I am always thinking ahead. I am always thinking about next week's posts. Or next month's posts. What will I be doing? What can I be doing?
For me, it's much more a positive than a negative. It's important to me to have a post ready to go every weekday morning. I love writing. I love planning. I like waking up and knowing the first task of my day is already taken care of. This blog is both a personal journal and a business tool and daily posts are important for both.
And on a plane so much larger than the blog : thinking ahead is really how I get through the day. The full weight of Paul being gone is crushing when I think about today. And how far today is from next spring when he returns. But when I fast-forward to my next half-marathon in October or Thanksgiving up with my family, next spring really doesn't feel so far away. It feels much more manageable. And so, I look forward. I make plans for next week and next month.
But where it's a negative, is when I forget about today.
At the beginning of the year, I choose magic for my one little word. And other than choosing it, I have done nothing with it. Tuesday, I started thinking about my word for 2012. I picked the perfect one and wonderful reasons for why it would be good to carry with me.
And then, and this pains me to admit, I started planning (in my head) the blog post that I would write to share my 2012 word. It was witty and I was so looking forward to late December when I could write it out and hit publish. I started thinking about how I would say I didn't really do too much with the word magic in 2011. And then, out of nowhere, I realized I have three and a half months of 2011 which I had just written off without blinking an eye.
FAIL.
This is a really long way of saying, I want to talk about my word for 2011. About magic.
Not only do I have three and a half months to live with and through magic, when I really thought about it, I have already felt so much magic in the past eight and a half months. I wake up everyday and am in charge of my own time. I went from being a non-runner to a half marathoner. I celebrated one year of marriage. Paul and I decided that we are ready to be parents (for real this time). We shared this great day. I am 1/5 of the way through a deployment.
The running thing alone is nothing short of a miracle.
And obviously, magic is just a cheeky word I picked. Magic is real, no doubt, but it is something you make. It doesn't happen to you. (I mean, even people who win the lottery made the choice to buy a ticket.) Every single day, I make a choice to be upbeat. To focus on the good stuff. To work and talk and cry my way through the bad stuff. To get out of the house. To create something new. To love Paul more. To love myself more.
I have a few more months to create magic in my own life and I am going to focus on not wishing away a single day.
