Starting the new year off with a little advice from Robert Frost and a reminder that the glass is half-full.

Usually I like to start the year with a bit of a retrospective on the previous year. But this time around I’ve found myself procrastinating until literally the eleventh hour. Since I’m not by nature a procrastinator, this sort of thing usually signals there’s a problem afoot, one that I’m not very happy to look at. So, I stepped back, took a peek around and found the source of the trouble.

You see, to be really honest, 2018 was a pretty rocky year. A lot of it was spent searching for jobs. Extended family has had physical and mental health challenges. People have behaved badly; friendships have been lost, feeling hurt. Two websites I run have been hacked. Writing has been tough and the book market tougher. Just so much stuff that I really haven’t wanted to look at it all, much less write about it.

In pondering what to do, I was reminded of a practice I felt led to begin during the long jobless months we walked through. Each night I looked for ten things, large or small, to be grateful for that particular day. I won’t lie and say it was easy, it wasn’t. But I can’t think of a day that I couldn’t find at least ten points of gratitude.

That reminded me of Robert Frost’s famous poem:

…Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

It reminded me, there are two paths to take here that lead to very different places. I would like to take the one that seems less traveled and consider the glass half-full, rather than half-empty. With that filter in place, reflecting on 2018 seems a little different.

My husband started a new job in August with a company that is far and a way better from the one that had let him go ten months prior. The position is unique and challenging and especially well suited for his talents and disposition. Yes, it is crazy-making at times, but not in comparison to ten months of job searching. While middle son is still searching for a position after graduation, he did get a really awesome part-time position with a law firm under the best boss he’s ever worked for. So, not yet there for him, but the glass is definitely half full.

My parents both had falls and surgeries over the year. But none of them proved as difficult or dangerous as it could have been. Both of them recovered well, with only a few lasting effects. We were also able to sort out some medication issues for my mother that have improved her quality of life.

Though we lost people and relationships last year, I am grateful for new friends who have entered my life this year and for old friends who have been there for years.  I am thankful than my youngest son has tackled the loneliness of young adulthood by keeping contact with old friends from high school even while he was finding new ones among the members of the non-music major orchestra he joined in university.

Though I hated, despised, detested every moment of dealing with the hacked websites, I learned a great deal. As I poured over technical jargon and did website-y things, I felt like a sorcerer’s apprentice reciting arcane incantations with little notion of how or why it might work.  Though I walked away with a greater technical understanding, I also discovered I could do a lot more than I ever thought I could and that’s not a bad thing.

Though writing was tough, I still got four books out to press. Three of those weren’t books I actually planned on writing, they just sort of came together as I was writing along through the insanity of the year. While probably not the best way to go about the process, it was a bit of confirmation. If I can write something with all that has been going on, then maybe, just maybe, I’m in the right line of work right now.

So, there you have it, my little tour down the ‘glass is half-full’ road in my woods. I have to admit, I really prefer this view of 2018 to the other one. I think I’d like to keep following this road for 2019—how about you?