Out with the old. In with the new.
For someone who loves old homes, this idiom isn’t exactly on the tip of my tongue. Yet, it’s such a tempting outlook, deceptively liberating and positive. While I may not apply it to my surroundings, every year that mindset sends me into a stressful mental scurry the last week of December heading into the new year.
Because: this is the year I will get more organized. It’s this one. No, this one. I mean it this time—it’s this one.
Armed with the latest productivity planner, I typically wake early, head to the kitchen and tuck myself beside the pellet stove. Beneath a towering, old window I scribble away, making resolutions and goals and plans to meet those goals. Drawing mind maps with lots of circles. Making bulleted lists. Using words like “strategies” and “tactics.” Identifying “bad” habits to shed. (Spoiler: they’re the same every year.) “Good” habits to adopt and adding those to a wretched weekly tracker to make sure I’m on point.
Shoulders hunched, I curl over this planner, feeling the clawing weight of these trackers and lists and mind maps and calendars and meal planners and timelines.
All the while, the old window rattles, blowing cold drafts as if trying to wake me up.
I know your secret. The old window whispers. You don’t want to do this.