2012 - the year of no decisions

{notes}

We were married in September and we sped right into the holidays without much time for reflection. And then January hit. We were driving home from a wedding at midnight and I started to feel my anxiety rev up. 300 miles along the coastal highway is pretty during the day, but at night it feels like you're hurtling forward without any inkling of where you actually are and it starts to get disorienting.

I was rambling on to D about how we were married and did that mean we had to start thinking about whether or not we were going to have kids (we are both so deeply ambivalent that it's difficult to even figure out how to have a conversation about it) and whether we should move, or maybe even try to look at houses again except we spent most of our savings buying a car and then having a wedding and do you know how much down payments are in Los Angeles? Does that mean we should move somewhere else? Or should we be saving even more? And then I jumped to careers, to wondering if we should be pushing each other harder and if I just enjoy my job is that enough because shouldn't I be passionate about it and also maybe find something that makes more money but what would we do about health insurance?

Before we were married, things felt pretty stable. We knew we would get married eventually and then we'd figure out what to do next. Now it suddenly felt like marriage had dumped this puzzle in my lap and I had to figure out how all the pieces went together and if you know me, you know that I don't like half finished projects so I want all the pieces in place NOW.

Dustin did what he's so talented at doing, which is to make murmuring noises during my increasingly amped up rants and then finally suggest that we just set all that aside for now because we probably aren't going to figure out our lives at midnight when we've already driven 400 of our 600 miles for the day.

And then I realized that not only did we not have to think about these issues at the moment, we didn't have to think about them for a while. I upped the ante and immediately declared 2012 to be the year of no decisions.

Obviously we still make little decisions every day and we'll make big ones as they come up and have to be faced. It's not the year of being an ostrich. But we're not voluntarily making any life path* type decisions this year. My goal for the year is for us to enjoy our lives in this moment. I want us to get to our one year anniversary and feel like we did the absolute best we could with what we had and got as much out of it as possible.

It's feeling good so far. 



* I've become increasingly jaded with life path decisions anyway. I've always been seriously type A, which means I had most of my life planned out by the time I was 8. And everything went basically according to plan until I graduated college and started realizing that you can plan your little heart out and nine times out of ten something unexpected happens and you have to re-group and possibly change directions altogether. Which is fine, good even. I think we need to learn to be flexible and I now value resilience over any other quality, hands down. When I accepted that I didn't have control over everything, it freed me up to start focusing on how I live my life and what qualities I want to cultivate in myself. I can't control external factors but I can make sure that I'm comfortable with the person I am, regardless of what sorts of hands I'm dealt throughout life. That's a good thing, but every once in a while my inner planner pops out and starts screaming about timelines. I'm working to ignore her. I discuss this issue a little more towards the end of this post.