Our Christmas was very low key and relaxing. We had Isobel for just a week before she was back to school to keep training for diving, so we purposefully didn't schedule much extra beyond piling on the couch. We had food, friends, and family with a bonus pile of snow.
We saw The Last Jedi and Isobel took 100 baths (no bathtub at college). I thoroughly enjoyed the spinning nest I built myself and may never vacate it. I really don't remember a more leisurely Christmas. And Henry, the lucky duck, gets another week off before he goes back to school.
I thought leisurely about 2018, trying to not be frantic about planning, goals and resolutions. That is hard for me.
I've had a very busy couple of years work-wise and would like to be more intentional with this one. But I always struggle with doing more. I have lots of ideas and want to chase them all. For 2018 I was on the mental teeter-totter of doing more online, classes, special groups, videos, something. My intuition was telling, me nope, but I kept mentally gnawing on it.
I'm teaching a lot this this year, and it's what I really love to do (along with writing and plotting things) which is what the sensible part of my brain kept saying. The truth of it is, online things are what a lot of smart people in the fiber industry are doing right now, and I felt like I should too. Or at least it's what I felt I should want to do.
These ideas didn't feel right, but I kept teetering and tottering, until New Year's Day. That was the deadline I gave myself to commit to anything new in the first half of the year. I was distracted and grumpy thinking and arguing with myself about it all, until I got quite a message about slowing down.
There's probably no bigger red flag to slow down and pay attention than to trip and fall in your own family room. It's just a bad sprain, and quite annoying, but it helped me make a bunch of decisions very quickly. No online reindeer games for me this year. I have classes to teach, articles to write and new books to hatch. That's not saying that I won't do anything new, but I'm approaching 2018 with intention, listening to my intuition, and wearing an industrial strength ankle brace.