2015 – The Year of Balance and Finishing Things

The library in my elementary school was half the size of a classroom, but as full of books as they could make it. Still I’d read nearly every book in it before I escaped to middle school and more books.

In middle school and high school, I read a book a day most days. I read through the middle school library in just over a year, and the kind librarians let me into the high school section early so I wouldn’t starve for books. On a rare trip to the county library I looked like a contestant in one of those “all you can stuff in the cart in ten minutes” contest winners. When I got home I always needed help with my stack of treasure—especially since I was generally eyebrows deep in the first book while I tried to carry the rest.

In those years, pretty much if I wasn’t reading, I was writing. I had an old electric typewriter on a table in my room, and a bunch of notebooks for when I needed to hide somewhere else (and a 35-acre farm full of places to do the hiding!) and I loved to write the stories that I couldn’t find to read. (Stories I can now identify as self-insert Hardy Boys fanfic? Yeaaahhhh…there might be a reason that stuff wasn’t in the library.)

Reading and writing—that’s what it has always been about for me.

But life, of course, interferes. With time the “need to” things rapidly come to outnumber the “want to” things. Stuff gets set aside. I may have read ten books a year, the last few years. Writing has barely been happening either—if I’m not on deadline for TDP, I have other things I need to do.

I’m not complaining. I built my life, brick by brick, and I’m pretty happy with it on the whole. That doesn’t keep me from deciding that I want to change it up a little, to make it suit me just a wee bit more.

So this is the year I’m doing that. I’m going to learn to balance things I want to do with things I need to do, so 1) I get more done and 2) I and everyone who has to interact with me is a little happier. I’m going to finish some stuff that I’ve been meaning to do for years (some of it fanfic, but NO self-insert). I’m going to read books. I’m going to watch movies and TV shows that friends I trust know I’ll just love.

It won’t be easy. I am not a creature of moderation. When I accidentally bought two bonsai plants, within a month I’d also acquired three bonsai books, two new bonsai pots, humidity trays, screens, wire, and a set of bonsai tools from Japan. I managed to rein myself in before buying a ton of mudman figurines, but only by telling myself to wait and see how the trees looked in their pots and also I had to find the perfect ones. Finding the perfect pots alone took several solid hours of looking at pot after pot after pot.

I could tell many more stories of my sudden and consuming passions, but I’ll spare you all. (Theoretical knowledge of flying a helicopter available upon request!)

Balance. That’s the plan. I want to start doing yoga regularly. I want to stop wasting hours on the internet regularly. I want to read books and write books and hang out with my kid and watch movies and sometimes stick my head outside and see what’s going on in my backyard.

I’m told there’s a squirrel out there. I’m worried she’ll eat my bonsai.