New Year's Resolution - Be Greg!

As my little blue Saturn streaked through the night on Interstate 80 about a week ago, my mind wandered, as it tends to do.  The drive from Des Moines to the Chicago suburbs is a long one, and between bouts of NPR and Top 40 music, I thought about a few things.  I was heading home for Christmas, and looking forward to it, but also looking ahead another week to the start of the new year.  I always say that I'm not a big fan of making resolutions, but then go ahead and make a bunch of them anyway.  It's time to face the facts and accept that I'm pretty much going to make resolutions each year.

But this year (as I described in my previous post) I was struggling to nail down resolutions for the multiple different categories that I wanted to improve or make changes in.  How many resolutions can one person make in a year?  And if there are a large quantity of them, what are the odds that any of them will come to fruition?  Well, somewhere along the way, while frozen cornfields slumbered outside my car windows, the solution came to me.

My resolution this year: Be Greg.

I confess, this is another stolen idea from Gretchen Rubin and her Happiness Project.  I read her book last year, thought at the time that it was okay, but have come to realize that I vastly underrated it, and that there's a lot in there that I would do well to think about.  The first personal commandment of Ms. Rubin's Happiness Project is simply "Be Gretchen," and I have decided to commandeer it for my own.  There are many subsets of this concept that I intend to explore throughout the year, but through it all, I intend to Be Greg.

So that's all well and good, but what the heck does it mean?  In a literal sense, I have achieved this goal simply by existing.  I am Greg, therefore I met my goal and can lounge around on the couch the rest of the year, right?  While that is okay, to a certain extent, my take on it is a bit different.  To me, it is largely about prioritizing.  As Greg, I have certain things that I am interested in, various things that I want to achieve, but without putting this proper focus on me, it gets lost in uninspired evenings watching junk on TV or lazy afternoons mindlessly browsing the internet.  Of course, those things are part of being me, too, and aren't by any means disallowed now.  But they shouldn't be such a part of me that they take precedence over what I think of as the "real" Greg, cooking, exploring and just doing.

It's an interesting balance, working on actually being yourself.  On the one hand, this whole mindset allows you to accept who you are, realizing your limitations and being okay with them.  But at the same time, another part of it is about making the most of your potential, pushing yourself to be the better you.  It's kind of like the Army's old motto: Be All You Can Be.  If there are some things I simply can't be, that's alright, but for the things I can, I want to make the most of them.  This may be tough to conceptualize without a concrete example, but I don't want to give away any of the ones I've thought of just yet.  For the moment, you'll have to be patient, at least a little bit.

Each month, I intend to explore one aspect of being Greg, setting out concrete goals and making changes to get myself closer to the me I want to be.  In the end, it's not that different from a regular resolution (or set of them), but I have this overriding concept to guide it all.  I've already selected an aspect of me-ness for January, and begun to take action on it, but I probably won't get around to writing about it 'til later this week. For now, I'm just going to be me.