I had such high hopes for 2019! I rode from 2018 into 2019 like a chick in a new sports car, windows down, enjoying tunes – confidence and self-assuredness oozing from my pores. And to be fair, the year started out pretty well, too. Of course, just the fact that things were going so well should have made me suspicious. I should have known to anticipate the unanticipatable. Or something like that.
In the beginning, 2019 was good. I joined Orange Theory Fitness in May to give my workouts a boost. Went from twice a week to unlimited sessions a month in July. I was getting in shape and feeling good. Spoiled myself with a new Subaru. A few good trips already in my pocket, another one coming up soon. Yup — it was all too easy, wasn’t it?
And then … August.
It seems difficult to imagine that everything good could derail in just a few months, but that’s exactly what happened. My brother, Jim, ended up in the hospital and in a blink succumbed to cancer and passed away. It was like waking up one day, and being all, “Whaaa…..???”
Some people react to life-changing events by becoming more motivated. Some respond by cramming their schedule and letting busyness override the rest of life. Yea, that’s not how I do it. I stopped exercising. I ate everything in sight. I avoided meditating because the silence was too wide for me to be able to wrangle my thoughts. In other words, I didn’t do a whole lot of anything. My form of grieving.
And, of course, the grieving doesn’t stop just because it’s been a month, two months, or longer. It’s easier these days. I don’t get surprise attacked by the sadness like I did in the beginning. But still. It’s there. Every damn day. It helps to remember that what I’m going through — what my family is going through — is almost universal. Few have been spared having to lose a loved one and grief and loss hold no timelines and work in their own slow, up and down sort of way.
I end this year weighing as much as I have in years. I’m sporadically working out, at best (Orange Theory LOVES me for all the money I leave on the table!). And for quite awhile, I didn’t have any desire to change anything. Oh, and to top it off, I managed to catch the crud that hit the office and friends and family (for weeks I was AMAZED at how awesome my immune system was … until the other day, that is). I will be in bed early tonight, celebrating the New Year at midnight only because the yahoos in my neighborhood will set off fireworks that my dog won’t be able to sleep through. She’ll wake me up when she has to unearth herself from underneath all the blankets she’s under on my bed to go hide in the closet (poor Belle).
Fun, huh?
To be fair, there were some pretty awesome things from this year: another wonderful family reunion in Vegas with a pre-game-vacation at Bryce; an epic hiking vacation in the Grand Tetons; a perfect little getaway weekend in Sedona in December. Not to mention my nephew starting his freshman year of college (REALLY HOW THE HELL DID THAT HAPPEN?!?!? I CAN’T BE THAT OLD), my 24th year at the same job (yup, hard to imagine anyone other than my family putting up with me that long) and my parents reaching their 55th wedding anniversary.
All in all, a rollercoaster of a year.
But a quick look back at my resolutions for this year, which were short and sweet (I believe I termed them “minimalistic” to make it sound better):
I promised to keep up with my Move Every Day commitment (which I performed flawlessly in 2018). I started out the year pretty well, though not perfectly. The first half of the year, I missed less than 10% of the days. And then after August, things went down the toilet.
And a meditation resolution: Meditate One Minute a Day. Which I did without fail until … again … August. ‘Nuf said. I will say this — I really wanted meditation to be the thing that would cause me to bounce back quickly from Jim’s death, but my practice wasn’t resilient enough yet. But, I’m getting back into it again and remembering how much it helps my brain and my mental health.
And that’s (just about) all she wrote. With the accounting of the year of 2019 complete, I’m ready to be done.
