I will take the best care of my body possible. I will listen to my body and I will hydrate, exercise, fuel, and rest it as needed. I will do all this while striving to accept my physical person in all its imperfect glory. I will seek the realization that it is enough, I am enough.

I will pay closer attention to sources of stress and anxiety in my outer environment and attempt to minimize them while striving to recognize that I cannot control other people, things or events, I can only control my reaction to them and their effect on me.

I will more carefully nourish and cultivate my relationships with the people in my life, friends and family, old and new, close and far. I will make bigger efforts to stay in touch while showing myself mercy when life gets in the way.

I will forgive myself more.

I will make space for the quiet. I will welcome it in and become intimately familiar with it. I will continue to learn how to tune out the “have to’s” and “should do’s,” if only for one hour per week.

I will take one step each day toward my future goals, be it reading one chapter, drafting one blog post, organizing one coffee date, or spending just five or ten minutes thinking forward.

I will aim to keep myself organized for I know I cannot have peace of mind without my finances and my house in order.

What will you strive to do in 2012?

I woke up this morning to just the most beautiful day I could imagine. My favorite kind of day. Cool and clear and sunny. Slight breeze, bird song. The calm after the storm. What we would have called at camp, a zip-pi-dee-doo-dah day. These are the kinds of early fall days that made me fall in love with Boston (and yes, late August usually feels like early fall up here). That first time I feel the chill of fall in the air brings me right back to roaming Commonwealth Avenue, sitting in coffee shops with friends, rushing off to class, books in hand.

I’m fairly certain it was a day like this when we first pulled up to west campus in my parents’ van, packed to the gills with “dorm stuff,” got one of those ancient, big blue move-in carts, the kind with the wheels that go every which way but straight, and settled in to my first dorm room overlooking Boston University’s Nickerson Field. The walls were dingy beige cement block, the gray mattress long since worn flat, and I couldn’t have been more happy to be there.

It really felt like the beginning of something. Everything was new to me. The city, the school, the freedom to go wherever, do whatever. One of the girls who lived on my floor used to get on the T (back when it only used to cost a dollar! And going outbound above ground was free!), pick a stop to get off at, and just walk around and explore. This was in the first week of school. I marveled at her independence but in time I’d come to know the city too. I’d learn how to get myself practically anywhere, becoming much more familiar with Boston than my hometown.

College was a revelation. You could reinvent yourself, become a better version of yourself, even if for those first few years you acted more like the person you thought you should be, while you discovered the person you really are. It’s days like this that allow me, if only momentarily, to experience again that current of electric excitement I felt as college began, and then felt each September returning back to school, the promise of the unknown ahead of me, and now every fall, every time the air turns. It no longer means trekking to the bookstore, getting that first glimpse at my workload for the semester, or reuniting with friends on the street. Now we mark fall in other ways, the annual trip to the apple orchard and bag of cider donuts, the first beef stew and chai latte of the season.

There’s a lot I miss about college and a lot I don’t miss too. I don’t miss living in small, cramped spaces, don’t miss the constant shadow of schoolwork haunting my nights and weekends, but a few times a year, the breeze and the sun and the trees conspire to make me ache for what seems like a much simpler time. And momentarily, I go back.

I don’t know about you and your circles, but mine have seen a great many devastating losses last year. Friends have lost wives, brothers, daughters, mentors, parents and children. Almost all of them were the types of loss that no one sees coming. Not only did we lose our pregnancy, but several of my friends lost theirs as well. Indeed when I look back at 2010, it seems as if I was rolling from one loss to another. At one point I was in Target, buying three different sympathy cards, and the section was so crawling with people that we were literally reaching over each other as we browsed.

And despite the great things that happened for so many others in 2010, that is how I will always remember it.

But. Time moves on. And even though dates and years and the changing of calendars is somewhat arbitrary (Saturday was really just another day falling in line after Friday), I’ve always taken it seriously. Because why not use it as an excuse to try to bring some positive change into your life? Resolutions get such a beating by the pessimists but if you allow yourself to view a new year as an opportunity, if you give yourself that luxury, then there is a way to use the changing of calendar year to your advantage.

As for me, my main New Year’s Resolution is to shed a few of the new pounds I accumulated in 2010. I don’t know what happened to me this year, some combination of the changes my body went through and adjusting to moving to the suburbs and doing far, far less walking than I was used to in the city, but I ended the year much heavier than I started it. Perhaps I manifested the weight of all the loss into true weight on my body. But whatever the reason, I’m ready to move on, ready to get back to a healthier me.

So I’m committing to more days at the gym every week, less sweets, less snacking, less caffeine and more fruits, veggies, whole grains, legumes and much more water. Of course I have had some experience with this resolution in the past which went… awry (to say the least). So there is a leeriness. But I’m hoping I can be successful in a healthy way.

My other resolution? Why, to blog more of course! I have been seriously neglecting this blog, once again. At one point I even thought about closing it down altogether (I do, after all, hate doing things half-assed). But I know that it is an important outlet for me – and it is just that, something I do for me. (Us bloggers are all self-centered and narcissistic don’t you know?)

So! A toast. To more blogging, to being healthy, and to whatever you’re hoping for in the new year, may we all find success.

And now it’s the new puppy + the new job. But you know, for what it’s worth, having a puppy is a lot like starting a new job. There’s the honeymoon, then the reality check, followed by the learning curve, and finally the adjustment period. So really, it wasn’t so bad. Plus there was the added bonus that thinking about one stopped me from freaking out about the other.

As far as puppies go, from what I’ve heard at least, Ava is a doll. When we first got her, we couldn’t believe how mellow and cuddly she was, but we began to get worried when her nose was constantly running and she was so tired all the time, she could barely keep her eyes open. It turned out she had kennel cough (basically a cold dogs get from being in the shelter. Very common, but also potentially dangerous for a pup.). She’s feeling much better now and has a ton more energy, but she’s still just as sweet as ever. And achingly cute, I might add.

Me and Ava in Boston where she was the star of Boylston Street

It’s definitely been an adjustment, no question. I didn’t realize how much easier cats truly are compared to dogs until I had both. It’s weird feeling tied to the house when we can’t take her with us, worrying about taking her out every few hours, having to go out for walks, trying to train her and not wanting to mess up. But it’s also incredibly rewarding to receive her constant and unconditional attention and love, and so fun to take her out in public and watch her interact with other people. (People effing love her, by the way. When we took her to Boston on Sunday, they were literally lining up to pet her and ask about her. Several people even took pictures with her!)

The job is going great too. It has definitely been an adjustment, getting back to the professional world and settling into the fast pace of a busy PR firm. But it’s been nice. See the trouble with all the free time my old schedule afforded me was the fact that I spent most of it worrying about whether or not I was using it in the best way. Even though I knew the irony of it, even as it was happening, I couldn’t help myself. And that worry was paralyzing.

But now I feel a freedom in going to work every day and knowing there’s no better thing I’m supposed to be doing. I feel like I have a purpose again, which ironically, was the very thing I was seeking when I left this field one year ago. I guess there’s an upside to being busy, especially for someone like me. It gets me out of my head and into the world.

No time to worry about worrying when you have 15 things on your to-do list that were supposed to be done yesterday, is there.

My, how things change in a year. Not only has my personal life changed dramatically, not only have I grown as a person, but my attitude toward and approach to blogging have evolved immensely as well.

When I started blogging last year, I was very timid. I didn’t know what the whole blogging world was about, so that made it nearly impossible to find my place within it. Kind of like me and the real world right now, except the real world is far more complicated so it’s taking a bit more time.

I dove into blogging head first, without fully considering what I had to say on my blog. In some ways, I’m glad I did it this way. If I had stood on the sidelines thinking for too long, I might have talked myself out of it.

Once I got going, generating blog posts became a challenge for me. It’s fine to blog about starting a blog, but once you get past the introductions, where do you take it? For me, it was a bumpy start. Individually, the posts were all things I was proud of, but I couldn’t see the common denominator, the thread that tied them all together. So when an idea would come up, I’d find myself agonizing over whether or not that “fit” into my blog.

But what was my blog? It took reading other people’s blogs to find out.

Over the course of this year, I discovered a true love for blogs. I discovered design blogs with pictures that made me swoon, personal blogs written in fantastically defined and individualized voices, and wedding blogs about everything under the sun. I even fell in love with a few “mommy” blogs and became completely addicted to Momversation (conversations on motherhood from some of the Internet’s most celebrated female bloggers). Even though I’m no where close to having kids, something about the way these women think and write is just appealing to me.

Then there were blogs that couldn’t be pigeonholed, kind of like mine. These blogs would throw up everything from thought-provoking essays, to pretty pictures, to poems and personal stories. I came to cherish these blogs and all the others, and my Google reader evolved from this annoying chore I felt like I had to clean up everyday to a finely tuned engine that delivers my news, my inspiration, my daily dose of oomph.

From reading and coming to love other people’s blogs, I realized that my blog isn’t about one thing – and that’s okay. It’s a personal blog, and that label gives me the freedom to really talk about anything I want. If I had to drill down farther, I’d say my blog is about being in your twenties, and all the randomness and identity crises, accomplishments and growth that go along with that decade. At times, it’s been a wedding blog, at times, even a social media blog, and hey, maybe one day, it’ll be a mommy blog, then an empty nester blog, then a crazy old lady blog. Hopefully it will be a 30′s blog, then a 40′s… all the way up ’til the day I croak.

I also learned that the posts that resonates the most are the ones that come from the heart. Simplicity and honesty and just being yourself, as tired as that phrase is, are things that are rewarded in the blogging world – and that in turn is rewarding.

I’ve come to love blogging, and I’ve come to feel comfortable in my own blogger skin. By no means, though, do I feel I’ve “mastered” blogging. Over the next year, I hope to share more and better define my blogging boundaries. I’ve played it pretty safe thus far, steering so clear of certain areas that I think this blog, as a whole, is sometimes lacking a little bit of “me-ness” (for lack of a more eloquent word).

So, I hope to grow. I hope to share more about how I came to be the person I am today, to provide a foundation as the blog grows with me. But most of all, I just feel a supreme thankfulness that I’ve found blogging. I think I finally get it, why so many people are addicted to pushing their thoughts out into the world. The power to develop your own content as you see fit, the lack of hard rules, the limitlessness… it’s exhilarating. And I’m just glad to take part in my small way.

First, I must say blogging adds a certain level of pressure to my daily life (for better or for worse, I’m still trying to figure out). Every time after I get a new post up I think, “whew, I’m safe for a few more days!” But then I blink my eyes and it’s time to post something again.

It’s like treading water. Or being one of the coal shovelers in the boiler room of an old fashioned ocean liner.

Of course there’s good in it too. On the one hand, everyone needs a little fire under their bums every now and then. Blogging forces me to write, first of all, and in a completely different way than I write every day at work. Blogging forces me to take the little seeds of thought that pass through my mind and really grab them and dissect them and expand on them.

Blogging forces me to do more: be more creative, make more connections, and most importantly, to be more observant about the goings on around me and how the very simple and small and mundane relate to the big and the whole. In every feeling, every observed interaction, is a blog post just waiting to be written (or at least a snarky 140-character message just waiting to be Tweeted).

Do I mind the pressure? Sure. Sometimes. It’s like that nagging voice of reason in your head, telling you what you should do. You should go to the gym. You should unload the dishwasher before you go to bed. (By the way, I’ve decided “should” is one of my least favorite words in the English language.)

Yes it’s annoying sometimes. But most of the time I really appreciate it.

I guess I’m supposed to say a little about what this blog will be right about now. Truth be told, I’m still trying to figure that out myself. I’d like to create a mildly entertaining, informative, happy little blog, but exactly what form it will take is still TBD.

I can tell you what it won’t be. It won’t be “your one-stop-shop for all things”-anything. It’s probably not going to be the first to spot the latest in social media or politics or the news because, let’s face it, I’m just not that cool.

But I hope you’ll find it remotely interesting enough to check back every now and then and find out what I’m on about.

Until then, hold on to your hats…