Welcome to January, happy new year?

I’ve long ago given up on making/breaking resolutions, so if you’d like to tell me about yours have at it.  Perhaps one that’s worked, or was personally kind, or didn’t cause you undue stress…I thought so.  Instead I’ve chosen a word for the upcoming year.  It’s been part of Susannah Conway’s December daily reflections recap on Instagram.  I’ve participated over the last three years and found a lovely online group of people in return. Some of the prompts repeat year after year and many of those I find my answers also repeat. Such as:

A wish:   To live my life the way I want my story told.

Thank you for:   This day and everything in it:

• Every walk and every sit
• Every compliment and every slight
• Every blessing and every lesson
• Every binge and every fast
• Every prayer and every curse
• Every laugh and every cry
• Every minute of every day that is #lifeonstowelane with #lovemytotinonna

And my word for 2022:

My word, you may have figured out is posture. It’s an interesting word, in the iceberg illustration of there being so much more below the surface than you can see, not the theater critic calling an opening night performance interesting. There are three definitions that resonate with me:

Physical, the most obvious and most important for healthy aging.  Yeah yeah aging.  I’m going kickin and screaming but I’m going. I don’t want to be a lovely bent lily as Jeanette used to say.  So my yoga classes will help and bringing my awareness to pulling my damn shoulders back will too.  I might need one of those slouching alarms.  Do not send me one.

Political, what a whirl wind we remain in.  I want my mind open, my attitude open, to other people and to social conditions.  I come from fighting for women, I can’t imagine I’ll ever stop doing that but divisiveness and blame are not my thing so I’ll be using my now famous: I don’t know what I don’t know frame of mind much more in 2022. Maya said it best, when we know better we do better. We all need to expand our mindset.

Psychological, HG Wells realized, “I don’t always rise to the new posture of things.” Obviously my retirement after this first year is still a new posture of things for me. In so many ways I have risen to new rhythms (I despise the word routine) I have purged more than half of my contacts in this year’s ritual, I have said no as a full sentence and I’m sure there’s more but those are the big three.  Hopefully I’ll continue to create a new posture of things.

Have I been posturing all my life? Probably. Mostly in terms of being a woman (car hag) in an industry that isn’t especially welcoming to us, especially the old broads that still carry the 70’s slogans, maybe not quite as severe as “kill the patriarchy” but you get my point.

My posturing now will surely be softer, kinder to those who remain, the ones I poke every January to make sure all is well.  The ones I want closer to me now that there are so many less insignificant distractions. The ones who got away, I want those back. 

So let us begin, together, in our own personal ways to make 2022 different, better, safer for ourselves and our people.  Shoulders back…