2022 is here

 It must have come in with a bit of a whimper last night because I feel asleep around 10  and didn't wake up until 1 am. That means it must have been pretty darn quiet. That's good. Don't need a ton of noise and light to herald the new year. That's just crazy. Besides Mavy was not handling it well last night at all. I'm just glad for the rain. 

So here we are. So many people have their hopes pinned on a better 2022 than 2020 and 2021, I'm not so sure. It's going to be better for me because I'm upping my self-care game and that always makes things better. But otherwise, things will continue as normal. A habit I really want to work on for this year it taking a picture every single day. As I travel through my life I see some amazing things. I need to get better at documenting them. 

INTENTION that is my word for 2022. INTENTION. My goal is really to live my life with intention. I don't believe that 'things' just happen to you. Almost every 'thing' that happens can be traced back to some kind of intention. Thinking about that, I'm thinking there probably are some exceptions, nothing is 100%. One thing that pops to mind is cancer. No one sets out with the intention of getting cancer. But they do have intentions of smoking for whatever reasons, drinking to excess, eating to excess, things like that. But then I think of children with cancer, those are most likely things that just happen. So let me rephrase that statement, most 'things' that happen can be traced back to some kind of intention. The intention is most likely not that thing, but whatever the intention was led to that 'thing'. Ugh, it makes sense in my head. Anyway, the goal this year is to live with INTENTION. 

I was putting together the back pages of my planner last night. There are about 20 pages that are blank and I rarely use them. Well I decided this year to actually use them. I made trackers for books I read - because that is a big goal of mine, more reading!!! I made a tracker for my TV shows - that plays into my INTENTIONS, I don't want to spend hours and hours watching TV so I'm tracking the shows that I watch and when I have time I go and watch one. INTENTION. I also make a Year in Pixel tracker. This tracker you can set anything you want to track all year and color code it. There is one pixel for every day of the year and you color in whatever color for whatever you are tracking. A lot of people use them for mood trackers with happy being one color, sad another color, angry a different color, etc. Since I don't let moods control me, instead I control my moods, that will not work for me. I'm thinking of using it for step counts. Below 5,000 steps is black, between 5,001 - 7,000 is grey (that's dangerous because that is my favorite color), 7,001 - 10,000 is orange, and then anything over 10.000 is pink (my real favorite color). The idea being at the end of the year you have a colorful, visual representation of some area of your life. I really like the step counts and am probably going to set that up today. I've been saying for weeks now that my watch does not track all my steps. There are days when I'm on my feet for hours and will only get 5,000 steps. That's because I'm doing stationary things and the watch only tracks real movement. I've been complaining and moaning about it for a while now, well it's time to switch that up. Since I know that my watch doesn't count steps the way I would like it to, I'm going to have to make my steps much more INTENTIONAL to make sure I get the color I want for that day. A change in thinking is sometimes all that is needed to make the world look different. 

As I was typing this I decided that I'm also going to do a year in review spread in the back pages. At the end of every month I'm going to put some totals in there. How many books did I read. How many TV shows did I watch. How many steps total did I walk. Any milestones that happened that month. Yeah, that way I will have one year on two pages and I'll be able to look it over at any time. I like that a lot. 

Another thing I have to do before the day is over is decide 3 ways that I'm going to put my word into action. My word is INTENTION - how am I going to put that into action. Well for one thing is no more mindless scrolling through Facebook. I've removed it off my phone and can only look at it on my computer. Whenever I sit down to use it I will state, out loud, what my intention is and how long I will be on it. Then I will set my forest to grow a tree for that time. Next up is game playing. Now I do enjoy my games but do I need to play them for hours and hours at a time? NO!!! I just had an idea about that, why don't I track my time on games? I could make a game tracker in the back and then track the actual amount of time I spend on playing games. I don't feel like it's that much, but hey, knowledge is power. Great, another tracker. I need a 3rd way to put my word into action and I'm drawing a blank. INTENTION...... 

Okay, let's back up just a bit. What exactly does INTENTION mean? Well, it means an aim or a plan. Okay, good. INTENTIONAL on the other hand means something that is done on purpose or deliberate. Which word do I really want? Intention - meaning plan or intentional meaning on purpose. I think I really want INTENTIONAL. I want the things that I do to be done on purpose, to be deliberate, and to have some meaning. So removing Facebook was so it wasn't easy to mindlessly scroll but that I had to make scrolling deliberate, so I am INTENTIONAL about my time. Same with game playing, tracking it helps me be more aware and intentional about my time. 

I've hit something here that I need to dig further into. I'm going to stop this post here, so it doesn't get out of control and do a new one about my word of the year.