And thank goodness for change

I've been doing some reading. I've been staying up late thinking about who I am and what I want to be. And, the truth is, it bothers me that at 32 years old I still don't have any answers. It's disheartening that I'm still asking the same questions I was at 17, 20, 24, last year.

One of the tasks on my list for this week was to clean my office. Haven't sorted through the scraps in ages, and they were getting hard to see around. In my three hour organization spree, I found an old notebook. It wasn't something I was looking for, nothing I'd missed. It was a journal of thoughts from my last personal crisis circa 2006. A list of things I'd wanted to change about my life and the journal as a means of working through them. There were five list items and, ultimately, I seriously improved three. No worries, I'm not going to rechronicle that here. But I stumbled over this in my reading this week, and it came at the perfect time.

It's true that we are what we think, but the caveat is that what we think changes, and thank goodness. If we weren't gradually disabused of limited ideas about the world and ourselves, who would we be? — Rebecca Walker

One of the items on my 2006 list now seems utterly ridiculous to me, something I care nothing about and wouldn't miss if it fell from the planet. So I am obviously not the same person who wrote the list so longingly. Maybe I'm supposed to keep asking these questions about who I am, who I should be. Maybe it's a sign of growth.

I continue trying to improve, a strength of our species. Living day to day has become more important to me than making the sweeping, lifelong changes I've often attempted. Streamline my focus to what I want right now, plan for as far ahead as I can see. This week, I will:

1. Practice yoga every day for at least 10 minutes
2. Re-commit to my Spanish program (3 sessions)
   
3. Submit a column query to the local paper
4. Start professional website overhaul to include a blog link

However long this channeled, enlightened energy lasts, I'm going to take advantage. Watch out.