Back in 2010, I wrote several posts in December as part of the Reverb project — which only ran that single year. Since then, others have continued including Project Reverb and Reverb14. So this month, I’ll be participating in that. There are different prompts every day; I’ll pick and choose the ones that interest me.
DECEMBER 1 / At the start: Where did you start 2014? Give us some background on this year.
I started 2014 at midnight, sitting on the couch with Jose and my mom, who was visiting. Emma was sound asleep. Here in blogland, I started the year by remembering 2013.
This year has crawled, and this year has flown, and this year has done both at the exact same time. I never wrote about this, but in January I also joined the “one little word” contingent. At the time, I felt like I was finally starting to emerge from the fog of new mom-ness. Life felt slightly more manageable…but only slightly. I wanted to stop stressing out about little things. I wanted to let more worries roll off my back. I wanted to slow down. I wanted to stay calm.
And so my word popped out almost immediately: calm. It felt right then, and as the year progressed it turned out to be more vital than I could have ever predicted. On many occasions over the last year, when I felt like I couldn’t take any more, I’d take a breath and repeat to myself. “Calm. Calm. Calm.”
As silly as it seems…it worked.