Happy mid-Summer! For those of you on the top half of the world, this is the longest day of the year. It’s also a gloriously sunny and blue-skied day, one of only a few we’ve had here in the PNW during the rainiest spring in 85 years.
The past 12 months have been some of the most difficult of my life. They make the prior year of cancer treatment almost seem like a vacation. And since this rough patch started last summer at almost exactly this time, I’ve decided that this is the end of that ‘year’ and I will be performing a full-on reset.
Arbitrary? Yes. But that doesn’t mean it’s an ineffective technique.
See, the reason that I always say that plan is a verb more than a noun is because life has a way of screwing up your carefully laid plans and forces you redo them. That’s where I’m at. But the key is that you don’t just pick up your shattered plan and try to glue it back together as is. No, you need to take advantage of the disruption to revisit, review… yes, REPLAN your plan.
Here’s how I’m going to do that.
First, I know that I need to prioritize self-care and healing, of all kinds. I’ve been pushing myself really hard this year just to get through everything that needs to happen and that culminated in a cross country power road trip with Covid. When we arrived on Wednesday afternoon (after having driven 1584 miles in 2.5 days) I had a fever of nearly 102. In the past four months I’ve burned through nearly all of my annual vacation time with only about 3 days of actual vacation (and not with my family).
Second, I need to do some desire workings and values analysis in order to identify some new goals for myself. There are things I wanted to accomplish this year that I still want to accomplish, but I’m also feeling like the big life shakeup I went through is an opportunity to ask myself what I really want. So instead of just grabbing some goals and marching forward, I’m going to make exploring my goals the actual goal here.
Third, I need to reconnect with my spirit posse and do some protective and fortune-building magic. I’ve spent a lot of time away from home this spring (about nine weeks) and I want to get back into a rhythm of regular practical magic. Also, the kind of grief and trauma I’ve experienced is rough on creativity (hence the last of blog posts round here recently) and I need to nurture that in myself again.
Finally, I need some rest. All these ideas and plans need to be implemented gently and with full acknowledgement that I’m fucking exhausted. I want to be gentle with myself and others. I want to take some time to rest. So that’s my plan. My reset. I’m kicking off a new year right now, on this, the longest day.
