2011 was pretty swell. I joined a roller derby league, traveled all over the place visiting old friends and making new ones, and settled in to my (no longer) new apartment. I knitted not as much as I anticipated (a meager 6-ish miles) but nailed my goal of reading 75 books (29,060 pages!!) and revisited spinning.
Like years before, I didn't finish my crafting goals. This seems to happen to me more often than not; Largely Unrepeatable is full of "I tried this and failed, then I tried THAT and failed, and now I'm doing this with no real hope of success given the time frame! Go me!" In regular conversation, that's often called overstretching oneself or delusions of grandeur, but I feel strongly that goals and challenges aren't always meant to be met, especially if they're truly challenging. They're also a way for me to figure out what is important to me. If you've been around here for awhile, you're probably aware that I'm not very fussed if I can't knit through 11 or 12 miles of yarn in a year, but it was important enough to me to complete the goodreads challenge that I picked up books when I might have occupied myself doing other things. Goals (and the revisiting thereof) give me a chance to focus (and refocus) on what I like and who I want to be. And who knows? Maybe this year is the year I complete the 12-Mile Quest; after all, it's right there in the date.
Becoming part of Sacred City's family of hard, confident, passionate women has helped me to find the steel, confidence and passion I misplaced somewhere along the road. I've thought a lot over the last few days about when I was happiest in 2011, and the answers were fairly simple: I was happiest when I was cheering for my team, listening my niece tell me that "T is for Tika," and laughing so hard I cried - most recently over my own inability to add two coins into 35 cents.* At none of those times was I taking myself too seriously or worried about How Things Appear to Others, and there's a lesson there if I can only grasp it.
So with that in mind, Tika 2012 is about focus.**
I will focus on:
- Reading 100 books
- Maintaining the relatively healthy agenda I've been following since October (hello waist! Nice to see you again!)
- Working diligently through the sometimes-oppressive amount of yarn and fiber at my fingertips, with the addendum of keeping incoming purchases to a reasonable incoming/outgoing ratio
- Finding employment
- Finishing my Master's degree
- Applying for PhD programs
But above all, I want to focus on:
- Making good and thoughtful choices
That's a lot of gerunds.
*Feel free to remind me of this next time I'm crowing over being Sooooooo Smart.
**Or, if you'd rather join me in my already-oft-repeated 2012 mantra, "pay the fuck attention, T!"
