Ok, I need a new new year. I'm hitting the restart button again. Already.
I still have all the Christmas decorations up. The tree is up, and the garlands still adorn the banister. Maybe I'll finally pull it together this weekend to get it all packed up, and maybe I won't.
2023 was supposed to be the start of something great. I had a "word of the year." Discernment. I had plans. I was going to hit the ground running and slash the superfluous while digging in on the vital. 2023. The year that everything was finally going to change.
But it's less than two full weeks into 2023, and the train is already off the rails. It will take several cranes and a lot of new tracks to pull this one back together.
I was heading back inside on New Year's Eve from a quick trip to the chicken coop to throw food scraps at the girls when I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. I looked up and was surrounded by three of my neighbor's large, sometimes scary dogs. They'd run onto our property and pinned me against the fence; once they engaged, they all started barking. One of the dogs bit my boot and my leg. I kicked him in the face - hard.
My neighbor, the dogs' owner, was outside his garage across the fence. I screamed for his help. He called them off. I walked inside, crying.
The next day, New Year's Day, I went downstairs to our basement laundry room with an armful of kids' clothes and again had one of those moments where it took my brain a second to compute what was happening. I stepped into several inches of water. I heard the squish and felt the cold before I thought, "What the . . .?" Our basement flooded.
Luckily, I found out from the plumber that the flood was not my fault. That was the most important thing, after the skeptical looks I'd gotten from my husband when we realized the leak came from the spigot I used to water the goats. The previous owners improperly plumbed the pipe that had burst. Sigh.
Now, we're in the middle of a sleep regression with the toddler, which means that everyone in the house is tired and cranky.
It’s time for a new new year. I need another reset.
I decided that today was the day to embrace incrementalism. Was I going to take down the whole tree? No. That stale gingerbread house that the kids and I decorated on one of the coldest days of winter break? I carted it out to the chicken run today. Check that one off the list, at least.
Watching the chickens and guineas dismantle the little gingerbread house like the creepy miniature dinosaurs they are, I had two thoughts:
If chickens were the size of dinosaurs, they would have no problem eating us all. It’s like my own tiny Jurassic Park out there. I might have to start building scale models of cities out of burnt toast and then watch the birds destroy them for fun.
In 2023, I can be the chicken or the gumdrop. I choose the chicken.
There's no limit to the number of resets I can take, and we don't need an arbitrary date on the calendar or the perfect set of circumstances to do it. Every day each of us can choose to start again.
Be the chicken. Eat that gingerbread house.
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