the battle of the (in)dulge

I love January. It always feels so fresh after the crammed excitement of November and December. I love how it inspires people to try and aim for better things in the year to come, namely in area of food and exercise. I remember several years ago when I worked at Starbucks the company went all out with a January campaign for fat-free, sugar-free, vanilla lattes. It made me laugh to think of the slightly hypocritic promotion department that had been cramming peperment mochas and white chocolate mochas and every other kind of indulgence down consumers throats for the previous months, now encouraging their loving public to drink responsibly.

January is a month to fight the indulgence from the year before. Did I waste too much time last year? Did I forget to exercise during the past 365 days? Did I get lazy in my relationships? Did I let the closets and junk drawers go to pot?

Any of that can change at any point, but there is just something about January. It's a clean slate, mentally if not literally, and it's as good a time as any to start. I don't think these things necessarily need to be resolutions either. Sometimes the word "resolution" is more of a set up for failure than anything else. But it is a time to aim for better, to set goals, to be more focused and less indulgent of our weaknesses.

There are couple areas I'm trying to hammer away at right now. The biggest item on my list is time. I realized how much time I was wasting with things that over time add up to a big fat zero. The internet, my black hole of time consumption, is probably the biggest culprit for wasted time, but there are other areas too. So instead of filling up my days with a bunch of distractions, I want to do more things that I look back on and think, "That was a great way to have invested time."

I was also inspired yesterday to prioritize organization! I'm not generally messy, but I'm big time guilty of letting my spaces (closets, drawers, storage bins) accumulate. More and more and more eventually adds up to junky, and there is just no getting around it: Organization require de-junking.

I have plowed through the girls closets, my closet, the play room, and most recently, my pantry! I'll throw pride to the wind and tell you that I found more than one item in the pantry with an expiration date of 2007 or before. And when I say more than one, I mean enough to fill up a 13 gallon trash bag. I knew it wasn't often that I reached to the back row of my pantry shelves, but goodness gracious! Some of that stuff must have been back there for upwards of four years. Oh my. Hopefully another half-decade will not pass before the next total pantry cleansing.

So there it is. Gut level honestly laid out for you all to see. I was not one to clean out pantries or closets, but that is true no longer! I'm trying to take an honest look, see where I've indulged in the past, and get to work to make it different.