A Brand New Blog for a Brand New Day

Happy New Year!  Today just happens to be Rosh Hashana, so I'd like to send out my good wishes to those celebrating tonight.

I've been thinking about blogging for a while now, and today I decided on a topic.  My topics are life and time as they go together.  We all have the same amount of hours in a day.  Some people make much more of those hours than others.  Some people build financial empires, or at least mini-empires that provide wealth of varying degrees for themselves and their employees and the rest of their business community.  Other people write and publish books that influence opinion, inform, and entertain the rest of us.  Still others hold political offices and shape the course of events in their towns or states, or even the country and the world.  So far, I'm not any of those people. 

I am an urban middle school science teacher, and yes, I touch the future.  I also make a great deal of contact with my computer chair as I play endless hands of solitaire, ponder the status of my fantasy football team, and religiously check in to train and feed my virtual racing frog.  Back in July I made the decision that I can, want to, and should be doing more to enjoy life and contribute to the world at large.  With a mercilessly stern hand I unfriended about seventy of my closest strangers and blocked both my virtual farm and my especially beloved and beautifully developing frontier.  It took hours and hours and hours to collect the nails and paint to get that virtual schoolhouse up and running.  And that, I realized, was a problem. 

I could easily rattle off a list of things I like to do.  I love long walks in the woods, kayaking, reading, writing poetry, and swimming in the ocean, but I haven't made time for these activities with any regularity.  I have always admired people who get involved in issues that affect the lives of others for the better--people who organize clothing and food drives, who volunteer at homeless shelters, who run in charity marathons.  In fact every single event that I have ever attended or heard of has been thought of and implemented by somebody. But I have never done anything of the sort myself.  Okay, I make occasional runs to the Goodwill Thrift store, but I suspect that's more of a way to clean out the closet than it is a charitable donation.  There are people who think about learning to draw, speaking another language, getting a master's degree, or figuring out a way to get paid to go to Antartica.  That's me.  Then there are the people who actually go out and do these things.  That's who I want to be. 

Today is a new day and my mission is to get out there and live.  Work time is prescribed.  Down Time, the time we spend outside of work, is when we live.  For some people, the two blend together seamlessly.  The purpose of this blog is to document my own transformation from someone who just kind of exists from workday to workday into someone who decides on how to spend each day and "does it".  I am inviting, okay, begging, for anyone out there reading this to join me in making each day count.  Please send me your comments on great ways to spend a life.  Clue me in on the things you do to make a difference in the world or to make a difference for yourself and your family. 

It's late afternoon and I am feeling productive.  School is closed today and tomorrow.  I got up early anyway and hiked the long trail at Plainsboro Preserve.  I haven't done that in awhile and I was pretty exhausted by the time I got back to the car.  I have been carrying a pedometer in my pocket for several years with the standing goal of walking 10,000 steps a day.  I don't make it very often, but today I was over 9000 by 10:30.  It was at about step 7000 that I came up with the idea for this blog.  I'd like to say that I came right home and set straight to work, but the truth is that while I did go directly to my computer, I spent several hours messing around aimlessly before actually getting productive.  I'm co-reading four books and as soon as I finish writing I'm going to turn to them for about 20 minutes each.  They're all non-fiction, so it's kind of like studying different subjects in school.  Tonight my husband and I are alone so we're going out to dinner at an undecided location.  After dinner I'm going to draw a motivational picture of a potted flower with the caption "bloom where you are planted".  It's from a Cursillo retreat weekend that I went to about 20 years ago.  We drew the picture as a group activity and I kept it in my classroom for years because I liked the message.  Then I went on maternity leave and the picture was gone when I returned.  Yesterday I got it in my head to redraw it, and that's what I'm going to do tonight. 

There's still about six hours of Today left.  Let's live it up!

Donna