THE BARE NECESSITIES
Cindy Maddera
See this Instagram photo by @elephant_soap * 6 likes
Well, it's officially January and a new year. It's that time when everyone starts talking about getting healthy, losing weight, getting organized and quitting bad habits. Resolutions. You guys know me. I'm not one for making resolutions, more like "I'll trys", but this year I'm not even sure I'm ready to make those. I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few months. Sure there are things I want to work on like photography and getting rid of things that do not serve me well. Writing, writing, writing. I should get a new prescription for my eyeglasses so I can see street signs. I most certainly need a boob check ( I skipped it this year) and a freckle check (I've got to stop looking at every spot on my arm and thinking it's cancer). I did a lot of traveling in 2016 without Michael. I'd like to fix that in 2017. These are simple things, the usual things, that I talk about doing every year.
New Year's Eve, a group of us were sitting down to dinner and Terry said something about ending the night by having naked pictures of us all. Michael told Terry that there are already naked pictures of me out there. I looked them up for Terry to see and everyone at the table admired the photos. I took those photos almost ten years ago. Michael commented later that I am smaller now then when I took those pictures. I could not disagree with him, yet it has been years since I have exposed myself in front of a camera. This is not about nudey pictures or pornography. It is about having a certain kind of confidence or boldness. I realized as I looked through those old pictures that at some point between then and now, I have lost that confidence and that boldness. I can't even consider myself to be all that brave any more because I never really put myself into a position that requires it.
So this year, I'm breaking my own rules about resolutions. I resolve to get up every morning with the intention of being my best self. I resolve to ask myself three questions at the end of the day: What have I done to brighten someone's day today? Have I actively listened to those around me? What have I done to brighten my day today? I want to be able to answer those questions with good answers and not just with an "I don't know". I resolve to regain some of that confidence and boldness that I used to have. I resolve to allow myself to be in a position where I can possibly fail and I resolve to allow failure to happen. This means creating a yoga workshop that no one may attend, building a shop for my photos that no one may buy and handing out my personal business cards while knowing that they are just going to get thrown in the garbage. It also means finishing some writing projects that no one may ever read.
I've always felt that resolutions are just setups for failure. Maybe it's time to let myself fail a little.