I was having an e-mail conversation with one of my cousins years ago. I don’t remember exactly how it came up, but she said something about how she admired that whenever we had the chance to get together or talk (which isn’t that often since we live on opposite sides of the country), I would say something about some project I was working on how I was trying to improve myself. To which my internal monologue replied, “Well okay, sure, but isn’t that also a comment on exactly how much needs to be improved?” Suffice it to say my internal monologue isn’t always one of my biggest supporters and that my sense of humor has a darker edge to it -- two things that will surprise few people who know me well. This doesn’t necessarily mean I see myself as broken, but I do have a tendency to feel the need to prove myself. Which I suppose leads to this drive to set goals and reach them, if only to know that I can.
And now that we’ve reached March, I’m still moving forward with this series of monthly resolutions to discover how much impact short bursts of concentrated effort can really have on my life. To recap: January was a misfire. I thought I’d take shot at reclaiming my writing momentum from November and push to finish the current WIP (work in progress, for writer nerds) but it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen in February either, but I decided to let myself off the hook and respect the process instead of push for some kind of arbitrary finish line. (And for the record, you cannot possibly know how happy I am to use the word “arbitrary” here; it’s been a tip-of-the-tongue word for about a week now as I’ve been mentally outlining this post and it just came to me RIGHT NOW.)
But my main goal in February was to take the decision-making out of daily life and any time I was faced with a choice that could make a difference to my health in someway, I would choose the healthier option. Now that February is over I can call that experiment a qualified success. Would you like to guess how many health-related decisions need to be made in the course of a month, big or small? I didn’t keep track, but I’d easily put it in the thousands. Or how about how many different ways there are to interpret what makes a healthy decision? Lot of definitions here: Physical, nutritional, financial, mental, spiritual, social, professional, emotional, intellectual... I knew in a matter of days there was no way I’d be able to pull this off in the manner I’d originally intended, so I tweaked things a bit. Instead of seeking out things to change or improve, I started waiting to see what choices naturally presented themselves and went from there. I knew I wouldn’t be perfect, and to preserve my mental health I gave myself permission for that to be okay.
If I got home one night and had an overwhelming pile of school work that HAD to be done for me to get through the next day, sometimes I would choose to skip going to the Y in favor of taking the time to just get the work over with (mental). If I got home and was just tired and didn’t want to do anything, I’d make myself go to the Y because I knew there would likely be days later in the week when I wouldn’t (physical). I usually buy school lunch out of convenience (mental), and if I saw the menu had some nasty vegetable (school lunch, after all) I’d either bring a healthy snack for the morning or plan to eat something better for dinner to make up for it (nutritional). If someone made me angry, I’d force myself put it aside and move on instead letting my stress and anger build (emotional). If I saw something could do for somebody else that might give them an unexpected happy moment, then I just went ahead and did it (social, emotional). And so on. Little things adding up along the way. Overall I feel it went okay and I’m optimistic that it’s a habit I could maintain.
Which brings us to March and a new goal to set. This is my favorite one so far because it’s probably the easiest to achieve and I know what a huge difference it will make once I reach it: During March I am going to completely organize all of my electronic school files.
It’s easy to get in a habit of saving a document you create because you might use it again, or an e-mail attachment that might be a valuable resource someday. And as time goes on and these files accumulate, eventually there’s a tipping point when everything is buried in a ridiculous mental labyrinth of pathways and folders and it takes longer to find the thing than it would to just make a new one. After many years of saving work with mostly compatible operating systems, I now have hundreds if not thousands of school related files spread out over a district server folder, a school hard drive, a school e-mail account, two flash drives, an external hard drive, a home hard drive, and a smart phone.
Last year I took the bold step of actually saving and organizing a set of files -- electronic flipcharts of my weekly spelling lists and related activities. Consequently I’ve been able to reuse them this year with only a few small tweaks, which has been a great time saver. I was even able to share them with my teaching partner who was new to the grade this year. It made me think how great it would be to have that same kind of quick access to any other useful files I have if I weeded out the redundancies and got rid of the ones that haven’t been opened since 2008.
And before anyone tries to tell me about the 3-5 applications I could download that would do all of this for me? First off, yeah, I know. Secondly, that’s not entirely the point. I need to do this myself if I want it to work. I need to know where everything is, how the naming conventions are planned and related, which folders go inside of other folders... all that fun business, to say nothing of the feeling of accomplishment that follows a good spring cleaning purge. I’m the one who dug this whole, so I have to prove to myself I can climb my way back out.
I’m just not sure what I’m going to do with the hours of free time I’ll reclaim when I finish. Maybe that will wind up suggesting something for me to do in April....
