Planning for the year seems like such a fruitless exercise. Instead of feeling confident in the steps I can take to move forward, I feel like I have one leg in the air, while balancing precariously on the other.

Go ahead, get that visual in your head. A fifty something, overweight woman, yoga pants like a sausage link….precarious doesn’t begin to describe it. Anyway…

Turning 51, facing my own physical health issues, and working and living through the pandemic have created a roller coaster of emotion. That heavy pull of gravity as the car clicks its way up hill, looking forward to the peak… only to feel the rush and loss of control of diving deep. Then getting stuck… in the loop.. upside down….. never quite making it back to the station where you can catch your breath and enjoy the adrenaline of knowing you did it! You survived the ride! Nope, not this last year. This year was just lots of gravity, loss of control, and getting stuck upside down.

I complain, and then the guilt sets in. I have not even come close to suffering the losses that so many have endured.

One thing that the news, the politics, and the horror of this COVID virus have created is a vacuum of suck. A pull toward all that is awful and worst in this world, in ourselves. A magnification of all that is wrong. And when we get stuck in this pattern of thinking, we don’t see the good. I fight that pull to the negative every… single… day. Somebody unplug this vacuum.

How do I get out of this?

I read. I pray. I practice self-care the best that I can. I decide to set goals anyway. But maybe this year I actually set goals that matter. I focus on daily, tiny steps, little things that I can do to move incrementally toward the life I want to live.

Is it a fruitless exercise to set goals and plan for this year? Maybe, but I’m taking my bruised fruit and making applesauce, or cider, or pie. I reach for the potential.

I choose to believe in the value of hope. And pie, definitely pie.