On Lists and Saying "Yes"

I think I can safely say that Brian and I had a great time for New Year's Eve. We went out to a place in Wicker Park with Brian's college friends and my life friends (isn't it cool how you can adopt other people's college friends?) for dinner, drinks, conversations, and scrabble. A few of us even started the dance floor, which I'm not sure was really meant to be a dance floor, but a floor was present and we danced on it nonetheless. 

I was thinking about New Year's and how much I love the beginning of new things, fresh starts, and how much I always love to make New Year's Resolutions. A chance to make a list, you say? Sign me up! I make them every year. I even beat New Year's to the punch by making Birthday Resolutions each year. Yet, sometimes, I feel like these resolutions resound with the tone of Self Deprivation. Running, diets, yoga classes, bedtimes, water consumed, handwritten notes sent, and achievements reached are all forged out of some sort of intense gritting-of-the-teeth. Discipline. (Oh how I wish I was more disciplined!) When I inevitably fail to complete something on the list, then, this cycles me downward pretty quickly into feeling guilty, shaming myself, and needless stress. 

Instead of adding to that already-25-items-long-list that I made on my birthday, I decided to back off the resolutions a bit this year and give the to-do-lists a break. Lists are my weakness (do you notice that on the right hand side of this very blog the most common topic for my blog posts are lists?) and while they are helpful for organizing this scattered mind of mine, sometimes they need to just be set aside. A little less gritting of the teeth. Maybe I'll return to the list of resolutions another year, but I think 2015 will be a good year for taking a break.

2014 was a year of lists. Planning our wedding. Finishing grad school. Finishing Teach for America but continuing with my career in teaching. Finding a new job. Setting up a new classroom. Finding a new apartment. Changing my name. There were lots of things to complete on lots of to-do lists. They were all wonderful things. I want to do healthy, good, and loving things not because they've appeared on my list of obligations, but because I know they are healthy, good, and loving in and of themselves. I just want to take a break from approaching life in a theme of forcing myself away from bad things, always in self deprivation, and more toward consistently embracing what is truly good. Of course I want to run more, sleep well, choose kindness, pray daily, and live fully. For this year, though, maybe there doesn't have to be a list present in order for those things to happen. Change and improvement doesn't have to be forced, and it surely doesn't need to involve guilt when a mark is missed.

Maybe growth doesn't have to come from a place of deprivation, of saying "no" to all the wrong things, but from a place of saying "yes" to the right things: to peace, renewal, and the good. I know God can speak into my life without all of my lists, and this year I'm going to give Him a chance to do it.