“Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.” - Walt Whitman
I started out this year with the goal to live it differently. It wasn’t a set of rules I wrote on a sheet for myself. It wasn’t something designed by someone else. It was something intrinsic, something floating around in my head as an idea. A goal to live my life purposefully, with passion invoked into everything.
I wanted to be bolder in my decision making. In my choices. In choices ranging from what I did with my voice, to my profession, to who I spent my time with, even right down to what I wore. I wanted to be bold. I wanted to not worry what someone else perceived my closet to look like, what one friend said about an outfit I picked out, what someone thought of me because of what I chose to wear or who I chose to have dinner with. Because, in the end, I never really have understood why people would make those comments anyway. I was always taught if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. Consider your audience.
I wanted to spend more time and make a concerted effort to eat naturally. I wanted to frequent the Farmer’s Market in 2012, to pick up fresh fruits and veggies as often as possible, to shop locally, to cook often, and to know what I was eating and cooking, what I was putting in my body. I wanted to remember verses like 1 Corinthians 6:19 and to live like that.
I wanted to be a good friend. To give space when space was needed and to recognize when it was not. To listen. To visit and spend time with the people I love and to put them first. But I also wanted to protect myself and my heart from getting hurt. To not listen to critics and to not take one friend’s lashing personally but rather to prayerfully consider their words and my actions.
I wanted to be a good sister and daughter. To make plans with my parents. To spend time with them weekly. To listen to them and learn from them and cook with them and play with them. I wanted to be the kind of sister my brothers call for advice or dinner or a running partner. I wanted to be my mom’s confidant just as she has been mine. I wanted to make my father proud.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote: ”I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
I want to be that person that soaks it all up. I want to see it all but I also want to absorb it all. I don’t want to waste time with superficials – food or friends. I wanted this year to be the year I do me.
And I won’t let anyone get in my way.
