I don’t know about you, but I woke up this morning full of eager anticipation. Let me tell you why…
New Year’s is the perfect time to stop and take a minute to assess where you stand. What did I accomplish? What did I struggle with? What did I learn? What could I have done differently? What will I remember most fondly? What do I hope to forget? Looking at where we’ve been helps us understand how we got to where we are now. More than that though, it helps us to look forward and use that knowledge to avoid pitfalls we’ve stumbled over before.
2022 taught me some valuable lessons and handed me some powerful setbacks. But it also gave me plenty of joy and things to be thankful for. It’s these small things that give my life balance and make everything OK in the end.
And so, for me, 2022 was:
- A year of reading! I managed to get through 74 books this year, which might just be a personal record!
- A year of friends and family! I finally got to see friends and family I have overseas, people I haven’t seen since before the pandemic and boy was it great to spend time with them again!
- A year of ballet! All three of my children dance ballet, but my son of 13 has worked his butt off this year and reached goal after goal! Watching him dance and supporting him through all the training, stretching and trips to train in Oslo has been a real pleasure.
- A year of games! When you have young children, playing board games becomes an exercise in patience with either a mind-blowing level of boredom or full of arguments and poor losers. This year however, the kids are a little older and we found a few games that were so much fun they couldn’t help but enjoy themselves. Harry Potter Cluedo, Mandelorian Monopoly and for some reason Rummikubb have been a blast and worth every penny. But the game that has given us the most fun is good old-fashioned Dungeons and Dragons! I am officially a Dungeon Master and I can’t tell you how much pleasure it is to rule with an iron fist… just kidding, I meant gold! 😂
- A year of craft! I may or may not have mentioned this before, but I love to knit, to sew and to draw! This year I have crafted and created to my heart’s content and the joy it brings me to see my kids wear their new woolly sweaters with pride makes all the effort worthwhile.
- A year of movies! Where do I begin?? Let’s just say I have seen movies this year that made me cry and left me awestruck and hungry to watch them all over again! The best one?? Hands down: Avatar – The Way of Water.
- A year of music! My family and I got ourselves Spotify accounts this year and I don’t think our house has ever been bombarded with so many tunes before. I love sharing my favourite songs with my kids and hearing them play things I’ve played for them before. My absolute favourite playlist this year has been the classical one I created to write to. I figured out early on that I can’t write with music playing and not end up listening to the lyrics, so classical music – especially pieces from various soundtracks – has become my go-to writing inspiration music.
And so I entered the new year at the stroke of midnight, well aware of what 2022 had given me and full of hope and anticipation for what new opportunities 2023 might bring. And what opportunities might that be??? Well, today that would be:
A new website.
There wasn’t anything wrong with the old one, it did its job admirably. I just felt like a change. So I took down the old one just after Christmas and spent the days running up to New Year’s Eve playing with the look of the site and its content. Over the next few months I will be posting new content and some of the blog posts I had on the old page. I hope you’ll pop in now and then to have a read and hopefully something there will resonate and make sense in a way that’s meaningful to you.
Have a great year!
S
S.Veelo - Author 