New Years Resolutions

About 147 years ago, give or take, I decided to start keeping a journal.

While it wasn’t a New Year’s Day or New Year’s Resolution sort of thing, I did set some ground rules for myself. Number One was that I would NOT waste journal space and writing time just bitching about stuff. The journal was going to be at best positive, at worst, blah, but never negative.

Somehow I managed to keep that journal for several years, before I got tangled up in e-mail (and convinced myself that that was a reasonable substitute) and chat and god knows what else, and somehow, I managed to stay true to the resolution to stay positive.

I wrote about tiny little kindnesses people had shown me, any given day--and there were a LOT of them, like the nurse telling me how proud she was of me for not smoking in my office on the day our hospital went smoke-free, or my doctor-boss walking to the lunchroom with me, just chatting casually about our everyday lives, people saying “thank you” or giving me a smile or just sharing part of themselves with me. There were unimaginable moments like one sparkling January day when the temperature magically climbed to 70 and people were stretched out on park benches just soaking up sun, and one March day when I went for my lunchtime walk and ran into hard-blowing snow and leaned against a tree for just a moment, and just for that moment felt so incredibly ALIVE, and there was the total solar eclipse and people all over “Hospital Hill” coming outside to watch--and the nurse poking a hole in a little piece of cardboard and projecting the eclipse on the floor for some patients who could NOT go outside.

I wrote down conversations that resonate with me even now, mostly little simple things, little simple moments, that somehow made me “connect” with other people in ways I had never imagined possible.

I wrote down LIFE. And it was cool.

Maybe it doesn’t qualify as a “New Year’s Resolution,” given that I started the journal in October. I could lie and tell you that I started it on January 1, but what would be the point of that? Writing the journal started with a resolution; it was my New Year, at that point in my life.

I’ll curse AOL for leading me away from it later. Or not.