Cultivate and Follow Through

My little piece of suburbia. There will be a vegetable garden back there in 2019!

We are almost done with another year and I’m happy to say that I followed through on my 2018 resolution to write and publish a blog post at least once per month! I can’t say that I remember any other New Years resolution I’ve ever kept up with for the full 12 months, so I’m pretty proud of this one.

It was a fun and interesting year for me. I turned thirty, and entered into another new decade of life. Some big life changes happened for two special people in my life – my best friend had her first baby and my sister got engaged. As for me, I said goodbye to my childhood home and started a new job where I get to write every single day. When I look back on the year I can see that my focus for 2018 was on returning to the extracurricular activities that make me happy. I tried out community theatre, joined a young professionals choir, checked out some good library books, and started playing guitar and piano again.

For the coming year, instead of picking a resolution, my husband brought forth the idea he got from a friend to pick a word or two that will define the year. He decided on Follow Through (I’d like to think he is inspired by my follow through this year *wink wink*). My word for next year is Cultivate.

Cultivate is defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as:

to come to have gradually
and
to help the growth or development of

There are many things I would like to cultivate, but here are my specifics. This year I will –
1) Construct a vegetable garden in my back yard.
2) Relearn to play the piano (and maybe start a band -not really- but hopefully jam with my friends).
3) Focus on growing as a professional grant writer.

The thing I like most about the above definition of cultivate is the word gradually. I can be a patient person when I have to be, but I’m not very patient with myself. I struggle with giving myself time and humility to learn and grow and I get frustrated and discouraged when I can’t get something right. For the coming year I will try to take a lesson from my childhood heroes – the Tortoise “slow and steady wins the race” and the Little Engine that Could “I think I can, I think I can.”

Happy 2019!