It’s been popular for some time now to pick a word or “motto” as inspiration for the upcoming year. I’ve done it myself in the past, but this year I’ve chosen a different path, because no one particular word was really speaking to me. This year I’ve chosen to…

It’s so easy to get into a rut of doing the same things all the time, not that I’m knocking the value of habits. Habits – good ones – make every day life easier. We don’t have to continually make decisions about every little thing that occurs in our lives, i.e. when we put our car keys in the same place in the house, it makes them easy to find when we’re ready to leave again. If you’ve followed me at all, you know I’m a big fan of Gretchen Rubin, author of a number of books, and a podcast, on habits. She has great ideas on how to cultivate good habits and how to recognize our personal tendencies and deal with them. (You might enjoy her thoughts on a list she creates for herself at the start of the year. It might be something you’d like to try too.)

With our big move this last year to North Carolina after 30+ years in California, I got to try lots of new things out of necessity. It’s been good. That’s part of the reason I selected this goal for the year – I want to continue to try new things as we move into and through the year.

So here we are at mid-January and I’m calling myself to task – what have I tried new this month? Well, I did try something new when our 6-year-old great-nephew came to visit for a weekend. We took him to the Marbles Kids Museum, which I have to say is fabulous, but not for the faint of heart. Those of you with young children or grandchildren would probably be unfazed by this, but since we have neither at this point, we are rarely in the presence of hundreds of children talking, laughing, and hopping from place to place as quickly as you can say ‘bonkers!”

Once my brain got adjusted to this level of activity, I have to say it was great fun. There was literally something to do for every kind of interest – from gardening to science to making music, etc. We spent about 1-1/2 hours there, watching him and all the other kids explore the nooks and crannies of the museum’s offerings.

When you’re an adult with no younger children around most of the time, you (obviously) do adult-things, so it’s very refreshing to look at and enjoy the world through the eyes of a child from time to time. (I even played on the neighborhood swings and teeter-totter with our nephew – no pictures of that though!)

Do you have a guiding word for the year, or some other challenge you’ve given yourself? I’d love to hear about it!

Thanks for reading!
Adena