Planning for prosperity
When I started attending church a few years ago, I couldn’t wait to return to my blog and contemplate what I had just learned.
It’s not that I agreed with most — or any — of what I had heard. But I needed to process and reflect. Because while I don’t have a lot of strong opinions in life, the ones I possess are always informed.
John Maxwell is pastoring today at my church. He shared a quote to the effect of what I just typed — “Learn to pause or nothing worthwhile will catch up to you.” (Doug King)
And in the busyness of life, I’m grateful for the opportunity to pause. And this phase of the blog will pass, too. I look forward to recording fun things again. But for right now, I have to let the past catch up with me so that I can take only the best into my future.
John said that, for him, 2011 is a time of planting and not of harvesting. I think I can safely say the same here. 🙂 The past year was my harvest. I was growing weed (metaphorically!) but it was nice to be high on life (pun intended) for the brief period I was allowed.
For me, there’s a lot of re-planting going on. Of looking at the crops I once successfully grew and choosing which of those would bring me the best bounty and the most joy. And of surveying the crops I always wanted to try my hand at. No time like the present to learn, eh?
John analyzes each calendar year and comes up with what he learned. And for 2010, he said he learned that:
1. Reflection turns experience into insights.
2. Adversity allows for intimacy.
I’m grateful for the mental catalog I’ve put together over the years. And while it seems I’ve spent more years planting (‘ho-ing?) than harvesting, it keeps up my spirits that next year will yield the products of whatever I plant now.
And going into his second point, I do get more intimate when the fan is spinning shit all around the room. I was reading my blog last night and trying to do so from the perspective of all the new readers I keep seeing on my IP tracker. (Welcome! *waves*)
No doubt, my personal writings are just giving folks more fodder for whatever opinion they already had of me, whether good or bad. And a part of me wants to take everything down and pretend everything is just peachy. But another part of me is defensive about my experiences and the way they’ve impacted me. Or, in some ways, how they haven’t.
In other words, I’m perfectly fine. I am spiritually healthy. I would not BE that way if I didn’t reflect at (sometimes exhaustive) length.
I realize I lost sight of one of my goals in the past year, which was weight loss. I remember going back to Weight Watchers and telling someone that I had lost three pounds my first week. Their reaction was essentially, “Well, things are about to get nuts, so prepare to forget about that.”
And I regret to say that I did put healthy eating on the back burner. I was OK with it at the time — there was new and exciting stuff coming up. But what the hell was wrong with me that I couldn’t handle both? That should never have been planted in my head, that one could not exist without the other. Rather, I never should have been OK with that suggestion in the first place. I should have fought to have it all.
Oh well. Hindsight. Visiting the past is pretty pointless when it truly has nothing new to offer.
In any case, here I am *not* reaping the rewards of seeds I lost passion about planting. Silly Goddess. It astounds me how much I know at this age and yet how little I implement any of it.
My friend Lady L gave me a bunch of lush plants when she headed north a few months ago. They are all looking very sad without their Momma. Looking back at this journal entry makes me want to head to Home Depot so I can replant them. What worked in her apartment clearly isn’t in mine.
Similarly, even if I don’t replant myself in another part of the country, a change of soil will do me good. No sense planting all these new seeds in a fallow field. I don’t know what this will mean, exactly, but I’m sure I will share it in intimate detail when I figure it out!