It is the first day of the new month and the new year. I am not a fan of New Year resolutions. I feel that each day is the chance for a new beginning. Each day gives us the opportunity to make choices. And while I firmly believe that this is the truth, I also feel that I have NOT been making active choices regarding my own life and my own future. I feel like I have been in a holding pattern, allowing myself to drift from one day to the next, without thought or purpose beyond what is immediately set in front of me. My focus has merely been about surviving the day, without plans for much more beyond this point in time. Often, simple tasks such as, “What sounds good for dinner?” are left until the last possible moment. I have been in survival mode. I have not been living.
I could make excuses for myself. I could put blame on a multitude of events. I could easily justify my behavior. However, that doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t help me or set me on a path where I am making choices regarding the way I would like to spend whatever time I have left on this earth. Decades or days, no one knows how much time they have left on this planet.
This realization is not a new one. Survival mode seems to be my default setting. I don’t know why I’d rather look down at my own feet instead of at the horizon of my future. Each day is its own struggle, and yet I think I often make things harder than they have to be. I get in my own way. I see the steps I must take to reach my goals, and ignore them. Perhaps tomorrow? Not today. Never today. I drift along, and the years pile up behind me, and I have scarcely any tagible evidence to show what I did during that time.
JULI HOFFMAN 