Happy New Year

I think I am developing a habit of making new year's resolutions in August.

I noticed yesterday that it just sort of happened before I realized what I'd done.  Come January, I am never in the mood for resolutions.  Things are just going well in January, I guess.  And then I give something up for Lent, which is something of a resolution I suppose, and then in August I seem to reevaluate my life.

I read someone's blog post yesterday where she mentioned she's doing a 21-day yoga challenge - every day for the next 21 days, she's going to do yoga of some sort, even if it's just sitting on her mat for 5 minutes, and she invites us to, too.  Personally, I have no interest in this challenge - I like yoga well enough but I don't see enough merit in it to make it a personal priority.  But half an hour later in the shower, I was still thinking about how 21 days is the standard accepted amount of time that it takes to break a habit - or start a habit.

Actually, I'd only ever heard that 21 days was the time needed to start a habit before.  I tried once to apply that to working out in the morning, but I can't say with any certainty that I even made it past one day.  So I got to thinking about it in a new way when it was defined as breaking: what habit would I want to break?  Enter: snooze.

I love and hate the snooze button, as you know.  I really want to be that person (like my friend Carissa) who can literally bound out of bed when the alarm goes off (- I almost wrote "the first time" here, but when you don't snooze there's only one time... see, it's engrained?! -).  So I thought... if I were going to break any habit, it should be snooze.

My, I am grateful that snooze is my worst addiction.  I'd say only addiction, but there is chocolate...  And coffee... and...

So last night I resolved to not hit snooze for 22 days - one day longer than the time it takes to break/start a habit, because then I can test the 21 day theory - ha!  I don't know, it just came to me in the shower.  The shower is like my meditation room, so if an idea comes to me in the shower, I just go with it.

Last year I did a really great job with my August resolutions to a) not check my work email after 8pm, and b) go to work 30 minutes early.  Those resolutions were great for my well-being in a crazy busy job, and I held to them almost to the letter through at least the first semester of the school year.  Which brings me to my theory as to why I make August resolutions in January - I've been on the school year's calendar for so long now that I no longer operate on the world calendar.  August really is when the new year begins.  And yesterday, without even realizing it, I made a New Year's Resolution on August 1st.

So Happy New Year!


OH!  By the way, today was day one.  I am proud to admit that I got up with the alarm.  And I would not call it "bounding" out of bed.  This was not even in the same county as bounding, much less the same neighborhood.