For these last days in December, I am participating in a blogging challenge http://www.reverb10.com/, which is an annual event and online initiative to reflect on your year and manifest what’s next.  Reverb provides writing prompts to elicit my reflections on 2010 and to generate my intentions for 2011.

December 20 – Beyond Avoidance

PROMPT:  What should you have done this year but didn’t because you were too scared, worried, unsure, busy or otherwise deterred from doing? (Bonus: Will you do it?)

Oh crap.  I signed up for this?  I mean, do you all have a few hours?  Because the response to this prompt could be long.  Grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine because my mind is already racing by categorizing all the ways that I fell short…let’s see…every day I make choices in my mothering that I regret because I am too busy.  Sometimes I throw pizza at my daughter instead of showing her ways to incorporate beautiful, healthy food into a meal because I am returning phone calls or rotating laundry or…you name it.  We all do.  And the truth is, those phone calls never really do get made, the laundry is never quite done, and so it is something that has the nutritional value of pizza again for dinner!

Even now, I cannot give what I want to this post because I have a conference call in an hour.  And I feel horrible.  Scattered.  Like everything only gets a fraction of my attention.

So what should I have done in 2010 but didn’t?

FORGIVE MYSELF.

This is life.  My life is going to be in a thousand directions at times and I perpetuate that momentum with my guilt.  The lists only get longer.  I SHOULD, I SHOULD, I SHOULD…

No.  Stop. Forgive myself.

Stop.  Forgive yourself.

Be joyous.  Make a mark on the wall that indicates how high the laundry piled this week.  Who knows?  Maybe next week it will be even higher.  Consider it a gain, not a problem.  Consider the abundance in that moment.  We have all of those clothes, and loving family members to wear and dirty those clothes!  I need to tell myself:  You are not short on time, you are just rich in life.

So if you did not do that in 2010, the forgiveness part, do it in 2011.  I intend to.  The laundry will get done, I promise.  Well…maybe not mine.

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