A New Year of Good Intentions: That You Really Should Follow Through With!

Everyone tries to get by on their good intentions and I’m no different from anyone else. I mean well, just like all the other people that say, “At least I have goals!” For many years I intended to work out more, I intended to find a job I truly enjoyed rather than endured, I intended to finally tell off the people that have really irritated my gentle sensibilities over the years but, here we are, 2013 and all I have to show for it are the IOU’s I wrote to myself in the form of…good intentions. Cash those damn things in woman! Yes, I can hear people yelling that as they read.

I have no good reason for not working out more because when I did go to the gym a lot, about four years ago, I often went twice a day, seven days a week. No joke. I used exercise as an escape because I’d rather work off my anger and disappointment than just sit at home stewing in it and, I also just didn’t want to see the person that happened to reside in the same house I did at the time. Avoidance at its best but, I got the healthy pay-off in the deal because when I did come home I wasn’t as irritated to find clothes on the floor and some lazy slob lounging with their dirty shoes propped up on the couch. It acted as a band-aid that hid the oozing sore I had been ignoring for years but the day came when I had to remove that temporary fix and, of course, I found yet another “good intention” gone awry.
I also have no good reason for why I’ve stuck with jobs that drained me emotionally and rewarded me very little monetarily other than the lame excuse, “I’m helping people so there’s that,” when asked why I stayed so long. Sure, I’ve helped multitudes of people in crisis over the years but who was helping me when I needed a boost? When I look back on the years I held human services-type positions I realize now that the only one that truly had my back was the wall and all it would have taken was one personal set-back to shove me over the same ledge I was talking other people down from. Scary, but true. And, as far as the reason why I never issued a fiery verbal assault on the toxic people in my life…well, I can only say that I tell myself I was being the BIGGER person. In reality I think I was just the biggest sucker but given the passage of time and distance I no longer care about having the last word with any of those people because in the grand scheme of things they really mean very LITTLE to me so I can easily set them aside and walk past without a single backward glance.
 

 

When are good intentions nothing more than excuses? When we continually “plan” to do something different year after year only to come to the end of your life’s road to find you truly haven’t even tried to start anything new in decades…you just TALKED about it. Talk is cheap but action is priceless yet we seem to value the “blah, blah, blah” more and put the most effort into talking big rather than actually living big. We talk about doing better for ourselves, finding that spot in the sun that really warms us inside and out and makes us smile so why can’t we muster up the willpower to go do it? I have no fixed answer for that because each person has their own reason/excuse. What are yours and why do you feel the need to hang on to them? Make this year the year we all let go and move forward for REAL.

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