Another May. My birthday month. Even though my birthday means much less to me now than it did years ago — I think there’s some inversely proportionate relationship between the number of birthdays a person has had and how much they continue to care about them — I still feel a little more affinity for May as a month. It’s when we can say spring has definitely arrived. Usually it even throws a few preview days of summer into the mix. In normal times it signals the winding down of the school year, but unfortunately we aren’t living through normal times. This year, well…I’m still not unhappy about it. There’s an opening feel as the temperatures rise and the grass turns green. However, since March and April have been uncertain times, and those are likely to continue into this month if not get even worse, it’s difficult to know right now if there’s going to be much about this month, if anything, to look forward to.
I’ve been hanging in there pretty well during the pandemic, but I’ll admit to some moments of slipping off the rails. Stir crazy, cabin fever, loneliness, whatever you choose to call it — I’ve likely felt every named version of it at some point. I don’t want to surrender the things I like about May if I don’t have to, though. Even if it’s just a mindset, I want to preserve that. I’ve learned enough about myself to understand that my best way of combatting any feelings of hopelessness or depression is to take as much control over my situation as I can. Because of that, and since there are so many things going on where control has been taken away from us, I’m going to spend this month working to intentionally control as many things as I can think of, to help me stay positive.
A few years back here on Summer Vacation, I did something I’d called the Momentum Project. The idea had been that people give up on New Year’s Resolutions so often because they set themselves up with a goal that will be too difficult to maintain for an entire year, so instead of that I had set myself a new goal to work on each month. They weren’t all successful, and some weren’t that useful to begin with, if I’m being honest. However, I did learn that I can stick to a goal, just about any goal, for at least a month.
With that in mind, I’ve decided to reinvent my daily routine throughout May this year, making it into something more proactive and productive. We all have things about our lives we’d like to improve, or tasks that we allow ourselves to ignore instead of complete. My goal this month will be about the effort. I’ll be scheduling my day to keep my head busy, and maybe along the way I’ll make some of these improvements, or complete some of these jobs I keep putting off. I don’t expect it to go perfectly, but I figure if I start this month of posts by announcing that I’m doing this, I’ll apply a little more pressure on myself to stay true to the goal.
It’s surprising how much can be accomplished in a month when you set your mind to it. I know I’ll have days when I won’t approach this plan with the same enthusiasm I have for it now, but the important thing will be to keep it going. Today is May first, so I’ve got about thirty days to see what happens. Fingers are optimistically crossed.
No comments:
Post a Comment