Happy New Year!

Remember the joyful naivete with which we greeted 2020?  For me, fresh from a breakup, it was going to be the BEST YEAR EVER!  It started with a sunrise run in the Cairngorms.  I made a list of my goals on my whiteboard (get one!) and all the adventures I was committing to having.

Then Covid-19, and lockdown happened.  I don’t believe there is a single person who hasn’t been impacted by the new world.  I’m one of those who’s full time job vanished during the pandemic.  And a lot of those goals on my board seemed impossible.

So I launched Merry May, with a strategy for finding joy in simple things – stars, kingfishers, sunshine.  In classic 2020 fashion, our lives continued to present challenges.  But that list, pinned to my door, gave me a system for finding moments of levity.  The plan failed.  But it wasn’t a failure.

This week, I learned that September 1st has a reputation as a sort of second rate January 1st.  The first calendar day of Autumn, kids back at school.  Season changing (as it always seems to do) and a reminder that all things shall pass.

Yesterday I taught my first live gym class back at Fitness Soul to real humans since mid March.  It was wonderful to have smiling, happy people following my lead in the room together again.  I still wouldn’t mind a mute button but I’ve missed people.

So I have a kind of “spring is in the air” feeling just now.  It’s sunny, the gyms are open, life is tip-toeing back to a new normal.  It’s a great time to revisit those goals.  Sure – my ambitious adventures planned haven’t happened.  But that doesn’t mean the plan wasn’t successful.  Tim Ferris is often paraphrased as asking “what if you tried to accomplish your five year plan in one year”?

This year, we’ve all lost things.  And one of those things is time.  We can’t claw it back, but we can still fill it up.  We have four months until those bells.

“Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.”



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