HAPPY 2014

Last night I sat with Allison and Madison tangled in a sea of limbs upon our couch as we bid farewell to 2013.  We flipped between channels offering glimpses of cold strangers laughing themselves toward the start of something new, a joyous horizon full of promise and potential.  Allison and I consumed champagne from the flutes used the evening we wed making a toast to be better partners, better parents and better people effective immediately upon the clock’s official timestamp of midnight. Madison and I made a banner earlier in the day from paper and crayons to hang from our mantle, a visual declaration reminding us of what we already know or at least hope to be true… that the New Year will be nothing short of happy.

After all, this life journey is ultimately our individual pursuits of happiness.

We make resolutions in effort to improve ourselves yet a few weeks later those hopes and wishes reveal themselves as empty promises and failures added to a rather annoying mental list.  It can be such a counterproductive cycle, the whole lose weight/get healthy/smile more/stress less mentality that attaches itself to the back of the New Year’s ushering only to abandon us and return 12 months later.  But we’re all guilty. We all do it.  We’re all on that path, that pursuit of discovering a happy we convince ourselves will be revealed if only we were 20 pounds lighter or ate an apple a day.  

So this year while I certainly want to become healthier, I’ve decided exercise and eating habits should be a consequence of the main goal instead of the primary focus.  Instead I want to avoid stepping away from the camera when pointed in my direction and make more of an effort to get out from behind it so the lens can capture more of my interaction with Madison.  It’s sad to think she’ll look back one day at the numerous pictures of herself and think she was alone when in fact I was there for every milestone except I was the one framing the moment in my viewfinder or worse cropping myself out.  I read a post a while ago that made me realize it’s better to see ourselves for who we are than to never see ourselves at all.  For the better part of two years, my biggest regret has been avoiding pictures and dodging the camera; sometimes the overall picture we see is so much bigger and worth so much more than our own negative internal commentary.

I’ve seen a quote appear in my Instagram feed multiple times over the last 24 hours:

And that’s exactly what I intend to do.  Pray more.  Laugh more.  Love more… and literally write about it all along the way with a few more pictures of myself thrown in the mix.  Happy New Year!