Resolved to Grow

Walking a Mile in My Own Boots

A rooster's crow breaks through the creaking cold dark, while the two big farm dogs, bellies full from breakfast, lay curled up on the rug at my feet, content to get in today's first nap as feathered, furry, and two-legged farm critters alike all await dawn to lift up her pastel face from her snowy pillow, and illuminate the beginning of this crisp new mid-January morning.

After leading us in with soft, still green-grassed feet and an unimposing, gentle blue crown, Winter has finally asserted her rightful position as the star of the season, and I lasso a few thoughts out of the wild, rumbling herd of New Year's contemplation, to inspect and digest and express.

With what will be come April 40 years on this earth under my feet, this is the first year that I've resolved not to resolve a Big New Change as of January 1. It isn't that I'm discouraged from past years' anticipated Big New Changes not growing up beyond their New Year infancy, or that I don't see value in setting new goals. Instead of stopping this or starting that, I want my focus to be just becoming a better version of me - and that's not an endeavor that can be fit into the tidy square box of a New Year's To Do List, it's a life-long assignment I have to choose to work on enthusiastically, and anew, each day I'm given.

And becoming a better version of the true me means I first must accept who I already am, with all my faults and shortcomings, and realize not all of them are meant to be conquered or changed, because without them I wouldn't be, well, me.

It also means being brave enough to filter through all the well-meant proposals and expectations of others, and stay true to the plan that's already laid out just for me.

It's so easy for each of us to look at others through the tint of our own perspective, and decide we know the path they should take, and how and when they should take it. But we have to remember that each of us is each of us, and gulping down - or doling out - every tidbit of advice or perspective that comes along, constantly changing to fit the new or widely accepted definition of who we are or should be, isn't fair to the advice giver or getter.

Now six years down this path of Life on the Farm, and nearly one year wearing these No More Office Commute Full Time Farmer boots, as we mark a new segment of time with the first page of a new calendar, I resolve to continue being busy becoming the true me, at the pace and in the particular way that agrees with the deepest promptings in my spirit. It may not look like What it Should to outside eyes observing, but in the end I want to be able to look into the eyes of the One who laid out His plan for me so long ago, and know I did my best to be the me He created me to be.

That is how I believe we can each make a true difference in each other's lives, and best help each other along our paths - by keeping our feet firmly on our own, letting each other know we understand how difficult it can be to walk a mile or even a minute in those shoes, when it seems sometimes that with every step, someone is trying to convince us to try on a pair not designed for the terrain our own road travels.

And as dawn glides quietly up into daylight, I choose to pull on my boots and step gladly up this new mile of my own road.