A New Year

Day 2 of a new year and I haven't stopped yet to think about what that means to me. I think I stopped thinking in years when I started bike racing 4 years ago. Time started to fall more evenly into seasons. Off-season and Race season. Not much else in between. A Ying and Yang. But not in balance. I was woefully out of balance during much of the last few years. By choice? By design? By sacrafice? In the absence of my own ability to live a balanced life with intention I fell into the trap of adapting and adopting the patterns and plans of others--at first as guidance, but eventually as wrote. Important life lessons usually come to me at an expensive price-- my mom always likes to remind me that I live life hard--I go after things I want with unrelenting passion, I fall in love hard and let my heart get shattered, I am brutally honest even when it means cutting someone out of my life--but this is the price I have always been willing to pay--depleting my emotional bank to zero to experience the satisfaction of filling it back up. I feel as though I've reached a point in my life where this type of living isn't necessary anymore. I owned it as a badge of courage, as a way to say, "I am strong. I am tough. I can do anything" yet in reality it was a mechanism I learned to apply to the crazed way I pursued life. Trying on and discarding things for fit. I think, in this new year, it would benefit me to avoid using my old mechanisms--just because they "worked"- and approaching my life with much more intention. Simple intention. Integrity. Open Heart. Looking in my mirror, not everyone else's. Something to think about.