Monday, January 04, 2010

The occasional flash

Every now and then, I have a moment of brilliance, and, even more rarely, I act on it. I always struggle to come up with a few succinct New Year's resolutions. Every year, I start a list and it gets pretty long pretty fast. It becomes more of a list of "Things to get done" rather than ways to improve myself. I mentioned the other night that I even started a blog post about my goals and resolutions, but left it unpublished because it had fallen into the usual trap.

However, Friday morning, I found an interesting reminder in my e-mail. Several months ago - I don't remember exactly when - I had a flash of insight. I knew what my New Year's resolution should be. It was simple, to the point, and exactly what I needed to do most for myself:


Put on my own oxygen mask FIRST



(The point of the resolution could be another blog post in itself, but I'l leave that for another day.)

I knew that I would never remember this resolution by year's end. Amazingly, I had a second flash and set a reminder in my Google Calendar. My resolution has popped up in my e-mail every morning this year (and apparently I've set it to remind me every day for the rest of the year - we'll see how long it takes before I say "I get it already!" and shut off the reminder). Sometimes I'm really impressed with myself for having a little foresight - most days I feel I'm seriously lacking in that - and I just wanted to share.