Tis the Season for REFLECTION

I'm in a reflective mood. The end of the year does that to me. Sounds heavy, doesn't it? And it both is and it isn't. The holiday season is NOW and my calendar is filling up with holiday gatherings here, there, and yonder. People I want to connect with. Events around the city I want to see to truly get into the "holiday spirit." My little tree is up and my music is more or less a round the clock medley of Silent Night, Little Drummer Boy, and All I Want for Christmas. It's my favorite time of year and with a lot of transition happening right now, 2015 sure is going out with a bang.

And I find myself reflecting back to the start of this great year. My hopes, my anticipations, my expectations. My year to #cutthebull. I'll save my yearly recap to a post for the end of the month which will likely be hard to write given I have only blogged a handful of times since March and the blog typically serves as a memory prodder but also because the year has been more sentences than chapters.

I subscribe to this Monday Morning email club and the author's recent post struck a chord with me. She wrote,

Well you have always liked to know what the ending is and when the ending is coming. Life doesn’t work that way. You don’t read the last page and then decide if it is worth the meat in the middle. You draw breaths in and out. You crawl away from the sheets too early in the morning. You send emails. You fall in love. You put gas in your car. You learn names. You do plenty of things you don’t want to do. You dance. You sometimes overstay your welcome and drink too much wine. You eat tacos. Too much queso. You wonder if you can subsist on chips and salsa alone for the rest of your life. You call home. You slam doors. You let people in.

Every little thing you do and don’t do is a sentence and you keep doing and not doing things until you fill the page.

Sometimes love writes whole chapters. Sometimes regret gets three paragraphs. Grief demands a volume. Faith wants a library.

2015 brought a lot of newness but it also brought a lot of just living. Living in the day to day. Sometimes the days and weeks rolling into one another without much pause or many points of interest. But I'd be remiss if I summed up 2015 with little more than two simple words: "it happened." Because it so much more than happened. So when I'm not checking out the Luna Fete exhibits around town, dropping my jaw at the beauty of the Roosevelt Lobby, or donning my favorite felt Christmas tree to a party or two, you'll find me reflecting on this past year - the highs, the lows, and everything in between. Because it's pretty difficult to assess where you want to go if you don't know where you've been. 

Let's do this. Ready, set, reflect.